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Bell Hooks Quotes - Page 15

All Quotes Abuse Acceptance Anarchy Art Awareness Belief Challenges Childhood Children Choices Commitment Community Compassion Country Criticism Culture Desire Diversity Effort Fate Feelings Feminism Focus Gender Giving Growth Heart Home Hurt Identity Imagination Integrity Justice Language Life Lifetime Loss Love Lying Oppression Pain Passion Patriarchy Prejudice Privacy Racism Rage Reading Reality Romantic Love School Self Esteem Self Love Sexism Shame Silence Sleep Soul Stress Struggle Students Suffering Teaching Understanding Vision War Writing

My work is mostly influenced by the concrete circumstances of our daily lives.

My work is mostly influenced by the concrete circumstances of our daily lives.

Daily Life, Circumstances, Concrete

Source: nefac.net

If anything I think postmodernism has the least impact on my work.

Thinking, Impact, Postmodernism

Source: nefac.net

I do get a little pissed at people who write me and want me to do things, and spell my name wrong.

Writing, Names, People

Source: nefac.net

Is it more important that you, as a white male, read my work and learn from it, or what you call me? I think it's more important that you read my work, reflect on it, and allow it to transform your life and your thinking in some way.

Thinking, White, Important

Source: nefac.net

We have to look at the substance of something rather than the shadow.

Shadow, Substance, Looks

Source: nefac.net

Sadly, anarchy has gotten such a bad name. We don't really see much evidence of it because people associate it with reckless abandon.

Names, People, Anarchy

Source: nefac.net

I guess I wish we could talk about: what does it mean to have a politics of intersectionality that also privileges what form of domination is most oppressing us at a given moment in time.

Mean, Wish, Doe

Source: nefac.net

Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us.

Play, Feminism, Scams

None of us, irrespective of our sexual preference and/or practice, imagine that we can have an intimate relationship with a partner and always have seamless harmony. Indeed, most of us assume that once the “honeymoon” period is over differences will emerge and conflicts will happen. Positively, we also assume that we will be “safe“ in those moments; that even if voices are raised and emotions expressed are intense, there will not be and should not be any abuse or any reason to be unsafe, and that the will to connect and communicate will prevail.

Voice, Differences, Intimate Relationships

bell hooks (2013). “Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom”, p.75, Routledge

Language is also a place of struggle.

Struggle, Language

bell hooks (2014). “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black”, p.40, Routledge

Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it's not unfamiliar to you. It's always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.

Moving, Passing Away, Moments

"Bell Hooks and John Perry Barlow talk “prana in cyberspace”". Interview with John Perry Barlow, www.lionsroar.com. 1995.

I'm such a girl for the living room. I really like to stay in my nest and not move. I travel in my mind, and that that's a rigorous state of journeying for me. My body isn't that interested in moving from place to place.

Girl, Travel, Moving

A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.

Hurt, Writing, Reality

bell hooks (2013). “remembered rapture: the writer at work”, p.11, Henry Holt and Company

. . .there is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress, and pain of constant exploitation and oppression.

Pain, Stress, Play

bell hooks, Cornel West (2016). “Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life”, p.110, Routledge

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

Determination, Self, Black

"Killing Rage: Ending Racism". Book by Bell Hooks, September 15, 1995.

Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now ... based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity.

Acceptance, Men, Racism

bell hooks (2014). “Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics”, p.89, Routledge

Teaching Black Studies, I find that students are quick to label a black person who has grown up in a predominantly white setting and attended similar schools as "not black enough." ...Our concept of black experience has been too narrow and constricting.

Teaching, School, White

bell hooks (2014). “Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics”, p.51, Routledge

To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.

Home, School, Self

Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.

Thinking, Justice, Feminist

bell hooks (2014). “Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics”, p.71, Routledge

I was teasing my brother that he was penniless, homeless, jobless. Right now in his life, racism isn't the central highlighting force: it's the world of work and economics. It doesn't mean that he isn't influenced by racism, but when he wakes up in the morning the thing that's driving his world is really issues of class, economics and power as they articulate themselves.

Morning, Brother, Mean

Source: nefac.net

Right now, for many Americans, class is being foregrounded like never before because of the economic situation. It doesn't mean that race doesn't matter, or gender doesn't matter, but it means that right now in many people's lives, in the lives of my own family members, people are losing jobs, insurance.

Jobs, Mean, Race

Source: nefac.net

I think it's crazy for us to think that people don't understand what's being foregrounded in their lives at a given point in time.

Crazy, Thinking, People

Source: nefac.net

It's really important to have life strategies and part of that is sort of knowing where you want to go so you can have a map that helps you to get there. And the traditional way tells us oh we get into school and someone else advises us, helps us, but that often does not work for African Americans female and male. Because what works for the dominant culture often does not work for us.

School, Knowing, African American

Interview with Pierce Freelon, blackademics.org. October, 2006.

My focus has always been on the work - that work being critical thinking and writing. I am always doing that. That's where I am, wherever I am. Critical thinking and writing as my heartbeat.

Writing, Thinking, Focus

"The BK Nation INTERVIEW with bell hooks". Interview with Kevin Powell, bknation.org. February 28, 2014.

Today masses of black women in the U.S. refuse to acknowledge that they have much to gain by feminist struggle. They fear feminism. They have stood in place so long that they are afraid to move. They fear change. They fear losing what little they have.

Struggle, Moving, Long

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