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Bell Hooks Quotes - Page 8

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

Even the most subjected person has moments of rage and resentment so intense that they respond, they act against. There is an inner uprising that leads to rebellion, however short- lived. It may be only momentary but it

Even the most subjected person has moments of rage and resentment so intense that they respond, they act against. There is an inner uprising that leads to rebellion, however short- lived. It may be only momentary but it takes place. That space within oneself where resistance is possible remains.

Uprising, Space, May

bell hooks (2014). “Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics”, p.29, Routledge

All the work I do is built on a foundation of loving-kindness. Love illuminates matters.

Kindness, Foundation, Matter

"Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh". www.lionsroar.com. March 24, 2017.

I feel like there is always something trying to pull us back into sleep, that there is this sort of seductive quality in all the hedonistic pleasures that pull on us.

Sleep, Seductive, Trying

"bell hooks talks to John Perry Barlow". Interview with John Perry Barlow, www.lionsroar.com. September 1, 1995.

One of the greatest difficulties the left faces in reaching out to masses of people in America is its profound disrespect of spirituality and religious life…people on the left need to acknowledge – we need to grapple with – the question of religion.

Religious, America, People

Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women . . . . they ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.

Strong, Confused, Reality

bell hooks (2014). “Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism”, p.6, Routledge

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.

Real, Believe, Love Is

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created.

Paradise, Academy

Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.

Challenges, Adults, Fiction

bell hooks (2003). “Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem”, p.103, Simon and Schuster

Professors rarely speak of the place of eros or the erotic in our classrooms. Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present, and not the body.

Believe, Philosophical, Erotic

Bell Hooks (2014). “Teaching To Transgress”, p.199, Routledge

Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?

White, Racism, Feelings

bell hooks (2014). “Black Looks: Race and Representation”, p.15, Routledge

There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.

Ideas, Long, Feminist

bell hooks (2014). “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, p.113, Routledge

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.

Thinking, Hands, Suffering

I mostly want to remind her of the recipes of healing, and give her my own made-on-the spot remedy for the easing of her pain. I tell her, “Get a pen. Stop crying so you can write this down and start working on it tonight.” My remedy is long. But the last item on the list says: “When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town – to pack up and go (you can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place where there are arms that can hold you, that will not let you go.

Pain, Writing, Healing

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.

Self, Female, Searching For Love

Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.

Real, Distance, Taken

bell hooks (2014). “Black Looks: Race and Representation”, p.170, Routledge

We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.

Struggle, Suffering, Valleys

bell hooks (2008). “Belonging: A Culture of Place”, p.25, Routledge

I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can’t read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a class that can engage in revolutionary resistance.

Book, Reading, Writing

Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.

Art, Thinking, Ideas

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

When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated.

White, Racism, Support

bell hooks (2014). “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black”, p.125, Routledge

It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.

Romantic Love, Expression, Want

Bell Hooks, Cornel West (1991). “Breaking bread: insurgent Black intellectual life”, South End Pr

Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason many of us will never know love

Lying, Acceptance, Reason

It's interesting--the way in which one has to balance life--because you have to know when to let go and when to pull back.... There's always some liminal (as opposed to subliminal) space in between which is harder to inhabit because it never feels as safe as moving from one extreme to another.

Life, Letting Go, Moving

It is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance.

Meaningful, Women, Home

bell hooks (2014). “Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics”, p.61, Routledge

To me, a woman can't be a feminist just because she is a woman. She is a feminist because she begins to divest herself of sexist ways of thinking and revolutionizes her consciousness.

Thinking, Feminist, Way

"Challenging Capitalism and Patriarchy: An Interview with Bell Hooks". Third World Viewpoint Interview, espressostalinist.com. July 15, 2013.

My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime. It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love's promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power of the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.

Believe, Grief, Sadness

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