Bell Hooks Quotes
Bell Hooks Quotes
Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune.
1449No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.
3266 Living simply makes loving simple.
1916 Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.
1014 Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.
3869 Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.
2419 All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.
1016 We fear that evaluating our needs and then carefully choosing partners will reveal that there is no one for us to love. Most of us prefer to have a partner who is lacking than no partner at all. What becomes apparent is that we may be more interested in finding a partner than in knowing love.
2637 feminism is for everybody
4480 Giving generously in romantic relationships, and in all other bonds, means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an important resource.
3123 When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.
4706 There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.
3393 While it is positive for young black males and females to learn discipline and self-responsibility, those attitudes, values, and habits of being can be taught with pedagogical strategies that are liberatory, that do not rely on coercive control and punishment to reinforce positive behavior.
3655 When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.
3445 I believe that it is impossible for two individuals not committed to their own and each other’s well being to sustain a healthy and enduring relationship.
2178 The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true.
3524 A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.
2471 But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.
2228 Those who choose to walk on love's path are well served if they have a guide. That guide can enable us to overcome fear if we trust that they will not lead us astray or abandon us along the way.
2121 …there is not a day of my life that I am not critiquing myself to see if my politics are borne out in the way that I live and the way that I talk and present myself.
1662 Most folks believe we are hardwired biologically to long for sex but they do not believe we are hardwired to long for love. Almost everyone believes that we can have sex without love; mosr folks do not believe that a couple can have love in a relationship if there is no sex.
4335 Concurrently, when it comes to matters of the heart we are encouraged to treat partners as though they were objects we can pick up, use, and the discard and dispose of at will, with the one criteria being whether or not individualistic desires are satisfied.
4031 When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.
2765 True resistance begins with people confronting pain... and wanting to do something to change it.
1027 The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.
4193 Feminist movement is pro-family.
1552 Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.
3114 Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.
1777 Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.
4517 Since we live in a society that promotes faddism and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change.
4641 …move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change.
1419 It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power.
1651 Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.
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