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c4b1c89
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When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.
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bell hooks |
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9075ded
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If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.
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bell hooks |
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4f55baa
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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.
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relationship
love
curelty
endurance
commitment
unkindness
harm
health
forgiveness
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Bell Hooks |
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f78c190
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Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.
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self-knowledge
love
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bell hooks |
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215460b
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To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.
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romance
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bell hooks |
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50479b2
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No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough."
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writing
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bell hooks |
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5c214d2
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the wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we..
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relationships
love
truth
gender-stereotypes
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bell hooks |
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68fd59c
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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.
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bell hooks |
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b3471e7
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The process begins with the individual woman's acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.
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bell hooks |
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2caeb25
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The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.
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pain
loss
risk
love
saftey
security
practice
force
hurt
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Bell Hooks |
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2df2a94
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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.
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solitude
loneliness
escape
relationship
fear
love
community
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Bell Hooks |
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8891e87
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One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withhold..
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love
inspirational
self-acceptance
self-love
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Bell Hooks |
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62902f8
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Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?
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bell hooks |
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6b6f604
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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.
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pain
suffering
love
redemption
scars
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bell hooks |
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db0196f
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I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another's differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this "In order to love you, I must make you something else". That's what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you."
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bell hooks |
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ea2ad19
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Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.
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bell hooks |
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604da6a
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To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.
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bell hooks |
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411613c
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Relationships are treated like Dixie cups. They are the same. They are disposable. If it does not work, drop it, throw it away, get another. Committed bonds (including marriage) cannot last when this is the prevailing logic. Most of us are unclear about what to do to protect and strengthen caring bonds when our self-centered needs are not being met.
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bell hooks |
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d2bab39
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feminism is for everybody
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inspirational
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bell hooks |
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2330b80
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Giving generously in romantic relationships, and in all other bonds, means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an important resource.
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romance
relationship
resource
bond
giving
recognition
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Bell Hooks |
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5055bca
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If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love; it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.
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bell hooks |
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122d737
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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.
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bell hooks |
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ac27653
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It still took years for me to let go of learned pattern's of behavior that negated my capacity to give and receive love. One pattern that made the practice of love especially difficult was my constantly choosing to be with men who were emotionally wounded, who were not that interested in loving, even though they desired to be loved. I wanted to know love but was afraid to be intimate. By choosing men who were not interested in being loving,..
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bell hooks |
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33fce86
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All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.
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bell hooks |
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4d2da05
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There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.
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feminism
education
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bell hooks |
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33e2dfe
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In a culture which holds the two-parent patriarchal family in higher esteem than any other arrangement, all children feel emotionally insecure when their family does not measure up to the standard. A utopian vision of the patriarchal family remains intact despite all the evidence which proves that the well-being of children is no more secure in the dysfunctional male-headed household than in the dysfunctional female-headed household. Childr..
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feminism
parenting
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bell hooks |
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517cf77
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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.
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true-love
fear
heart
love
generousity
belonging
gift
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Bell Hooks |
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e8205e2
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One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..
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bell hooks |
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bb7265b
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It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term "feminism," to focus on the fact that to be "feminist" in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppres..
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bell hooks |
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7b2b541
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The growing number of gated communities in our nation is but one example of the obsession with safety. With guards at the gate, individuals still have bars and elaborate internal security systems. Americans spend more than thirty billion dollars a year on security. When I have stayed with friends in these communities and inquired as to whether all the security is in response to an actual danger I am told "not really," that it is the fear of..
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racism
love
white-supremacy
patriarchy
media
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Bell Hooks |
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0e92e51
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We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.
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white-supremacy
patriarchy
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bell hooks |
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2ba2f6e
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To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.
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bell hooks |
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01579f9
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There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.
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bell hooks |
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7a54b43
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Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.
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bell hooks |
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30d8694
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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.
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bell hooks |
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b4e0ff3
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The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.
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love
self-love
women-s-strength
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Bell Hooks |
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b18d335
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Patriarchy has no gender.
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bell hooks |
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9c7613a
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There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.
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bell hooks |
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2a9699e
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Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. This was a definition of feminism I offered in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center more than 10 years ago. It was my hope at the time that it would become a common definition everyone would use. I liked this definition because it did not imply that men were the enemy. By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practica..
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sexism
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Bell Hooks |
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751929d
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How different things might be if, rather than saying "I think I'm in love," we were saying "I've connected with someone in a way that makes me think I'm on the way to knowing love." Or if instead of saying "I am in love" we say "I am loving" or "I will love." Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language."
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romance
love
connection
communication
language
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Bell Hooks |
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55f2662
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Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD's, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.
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bell hooks |
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09bf6db
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Part of the racialized sexism wants everyone to think that a 15-year old Mexican is not a girl, she's a woman. We know she's a girl. We can never emphasize this enough, because this is the fate of colored girls globally right now: the denial of their girlhood, the denial of their childhood, and the constant state of risk and danger they are living in.
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race
sexism
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bell hooks |
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f3f0482
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Our hearts connect with lots of folks in a lifetime but most of us will go to our graves with no experience of true love.
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bell hooks |
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966a786
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Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.
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bell hooks |