bell hooks > Quotes

“I would like heterosexual women to be as actively curious about how and why and when they became heterosexual as I have been about how and why and when I became a Lesbian.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“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.”
― Bell Hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“O amor é o que o amor faz. Amar é um ato da vontade — isto é, tanto uma intenção quanto uma ação. A vontade também implica escolha. Nós não temos que amar. Escolhemos amar”.”
― bell hooks, Tudo sobre o amor: novas perspectivas

“True forgiveness requires that we understand the negative actions of another.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth. It’s not what you do but how you do it.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Peck defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals, 'who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationship go deeper than the masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to rejoice together, mourn together, and to delight in each other, and make other's conditions our own.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Since patriarchal parenting does not teach boys to express their feelings in words, either boys act out or they implode. Very few boys are taught to express with words what they feel, when they feel it. And even when boys are able to express feelings in early childhood, they learn as they grow up that they are not supposed to feel and they shut down.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“A commitment to a spiritual life requires us to do more than read a good book or go on a restful retreat. It requires conscious practice, a willingness to unite the way we think with the way we act.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Boys need healthy self-esteem. They need love. And a wise and loving feminist politics can provide the only foundation to save the lives of male children. Patriarchy will not heal them.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Although white sociologists would have all Americans believe that the black female is often the “man of the house,” this is rarely the case. Even in single-parent homes, black mothers may go so far as to delegate the responsibility of being the “man” to male children. In some single-parent homes where no male is present, it is acceptable for a visiting male friend or lover to assume a decision-making role. Few black women, even in homes where no men are present, see themselves as adopting a “male” role.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love. Since loving lets us let go of so much fear, it also guides our grief. When we lose someone we love, we can grieve without shame. Given that commitment is an important aspect of love, we who love know we must sustain ties in life and death. Our mourning, our letting ourselves grieve over the loss of loved ones is an expression of our commitment, a form of communication and communion. Knowing”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“To heal, men must learn to feel again. They must learn to break the silence, to speak the pain. Often men, to speak the pain, first turn to the women in their lives and are refused a hearing. In many ways women have bought into the patriarchal masculine mystique. Asked to witness a male expressing feelings, to listen to those feelings and respond, they may simply turn away. There was a time when I would often ask the man in my life to tell me his feelings. And yet when he began to speak, I would either interrupt or silence him by crying, sending him the message that his feelings were too heavy for anyone to bear, so it was best if he kept them to himself. As the Sylvia cartoon I have previously mentioned reminds us, women are fearful of hearing men voice feelings. I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he was wounded, then how could he protect me?

As I matured, as my feminist consciousness developed to include the recognition of patriarchal abuse of men, I could hear male pain. I could see men as comrades and fellow travelers on the journey of life and not as existing merely to provide instrumental support. Since men have yet to organize a feminist men’s movement that would proclaim the rights of men to emotional awareness and expression, we will not know how many men have indeed tried to express feelings, only to have the women in their lives tune out or be turned off. Talking with men, I have been stunned when individual males would confess to sharing intense feelings with a male buddy, only to have that buddy either interrupt to silence the sharing, offer no response, or distance himself. Men of all ages who want to talk about feelings usually learn not to go to other men. And if they are heterosexual, they are far more likely to try sharing with women they have been sexually intimate with. Women talk about the fact that intimate conversation with males often takes place in the brief moments before and after sex. And of course our mass media provide the image again and again of the man who goes to a sex worker to share his feelings because there is no intimacy in that relationship and therefore no real emotional risk.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“We fail at romantic love when we have not learned the art of loving. It's as simple as that. Often we confuse perfect passion with perfect love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“First and foremost feminist movement urged females to no longer see ourselves and our bodies as the property of men.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“I am grateful that the images of masculinity as a child were varied. I knew that lots of men were “macho” like my dad, but I also knew there were men like my granddad— calm, gentle, and kind. These diverse images shaped my perspective. In my childhood there were men who were not ashamed to express their love of God openly and to shed ecstatic tears. These men were renegades, rebelling against the patriarchal norm. And they were the men I was destined to love, the sensitive, soulful, shy men who were looked down upon by the patriarchy. The men who inhabited my dreams were men of feeling.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“As black people in a white-supremacist culture we have had a psychohistory of learning to utterly hide or repress our vulnerability in order to survive. When this survival strategy links with the overall cultural devaluation of vulnerability it makes sense that so many black folks have wrongly interpreted invulnerability as a sign of emotional strength. Maintaining this survival strategy when we no longer have to fear extreme violence at the hands of racist whites has damaged our emotional and intimate bonds. The inability to be vulnerable means that we are unable to feel. If we cannot feel we cannot truly emotionally connect with one another. We cannot know love. No wonder then that the lovelessness that abounds in our culture is even more intense among African-Americans.”
― Bell Hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

“Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason many of us will never know love. It is impossible to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth when the core of one's being and identity is shrouded in secrecy and lies. Trusting that another person always intends your good, having a core foundation of loving practice, cannot exist within a context of deception.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The idea of "common oppression" was a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women's varied and complex social reality. Women are divided by sexist attitudes, racism, class privilege, and a host of other prejudices. Sustained woman bonding can occur only when these divisions are confronted and the necessary steps are taken to eliminate them.”
― Bell Hooks

“Working within the conventional corporate academic world where the primary goals of institutions is to sell education and produce a professional managerial class schooled in the art of obedience to authority and accepting of dominator-based hierarchy, I often felt as though I was in the dysfunctional family of my childhood where I was often in the outsider position and scapegoated, viewed as both mad and yet a threat.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“Sexist discrimination has prevented white women from assuming the dominant role in the perpetuation of white racial imperialism, but it has not prevented white women from absorbing, supporting, and advocating racist ideology or acting individually as racist oppressors in various spheres of American life.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“..The fate of the poor both locally and globally will to a grave extent determine the quality of life for those who are lucky enough to have class privilege. Repudiating exploitation by word and deed is a gesture of solidarity with the poor.”
― Bell Hooks

“As I encouraged black women to become active feminists, I was told that we should not become “women’s libbers” because racism was the oppressive force in our lives—not sexism. To both groups I voiced my conviction that the struggle to end racism and the struggle to end sexism were naturally intertwined, that to make them separate was to deny a basic truth of our existence, that race and sex are both immutable facets of human identity.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love—“care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge”—in our everyday lives.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Many Black men feel they have been driven into the grave by heart attacks and strokes while trying to appear as that solid rock for the individuals in their lives—be they children, spouse, lover, gay companion, what have you, who don't ever want to see them break down. These individuals don't want to see the person they labeled "provider" as having times of vulnerability. Which reaffirms why critiques of conventional notions of patriarchy are so important. Because that model of manhood denies the full humanity of men, denies that there are moments in men's lives when they need to say, "I can't go out there and do this stressful thing that is breaking my spirit anymore." Black men have not felt, especially the many Black men who have been strong providers, who have carried the mantle of representing a strong, dignified Black manhood, that they need a space to articulate their emotionaly vulnerability.”
― bell hooks, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

“Few black men can look at the data about black male lives and not see clearly the dangers they face and the extent to which those dangers are in place because of their blind allegiance to dominator culture. Black male-on-black male homicide would not exist if it were not encouraged and reinforced by notions of patriarchal manhood and white supremacy. For if it was just about manhood shootouts, black males would be killing white men at the same rates that they kill one another. They buy into the racist/sexist assumption that the black male is valueless and therefore when you take a black man 's life you are just taking nothing from nothing,”
― Bell Hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

“Like many liberal men in the age of feminism, he believed women should have equal access to jobs and be given equal pay, but when it came to matters of home and heart he still believed caregiving was the female role. Like many men, he wanted a woman to be 'just like his mama' so that he did not have to do the work of growing up.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“In American Beauty Lester suffers alone. His critical investigation of his feelings takes place in his head. And he cannot survive being so utterly vulnerable and isolated. Ultimately, movies send the message to male audiences that men will not be meaningfully empowered if they learn to love. American Beauty finally tells audiences that there is no hope for depressed men who are willing to critically reflect on their lives. It tells us that even when men are willing to change, there is no place for them in patriarchal culture. The opening lines of the film say it all: “My name is Lester Burnham. I am forty-two. In less than a year I’ll be dead. Of course, I don’t know that yet. And anyway, I’m dead already.” Popular culture offers us few or no redemptive images of men who start out emotionally dead.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“When men are able to assume an equal role with women as caregivers, it becomes most evident that they can nurture as well as women.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Many men who have retired from jobs, particularly men over sixty in our culture, often feel that aging allows them to break free of the patriarchy. With time on their hands, they are often compelled by extreme loneliness, alienation, a crisis of meaning, or other circumstances, to develop emotional selves. They are the elders who can speak to younger generations of men, debunking the patriarchal myth of work; those voices need to be heard. They are the voices that tell younger men, 'Don't wait until your life is near its end to find your feeling, to follow your heart. Don't wait until it's too late.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love