bell hooks > Quotes

“The tragic irony here is that patriarchal thinking has socialized males to believe that their manhood is affirmed when they are emotionally withholding.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“The space of our lack is also the space of possibility. As we yearn, we make ourselves ready to receive the love that is coming to us, as gift, as promise, as earthly paradise.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Society's collective fear of love must be faced if we are to lay claim to a love ethic that can inspire us and give us the courage to make necessary changes.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Critical interventions around race did not destroy the women's movement; it became stronger . . . It shows us that no matter how misguided feminist thinkers have been in the past, the will to change, the will to create the context for struggle and liberation, remains stronger than the need to hold on to wrong beliefs and assumptions.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“From childhood on, I found many of my angels in favorite authors, writers who created books that enabled me to understand life with greater complexity. These works opened my heart to compassion, forgiveness, and understanding.”
― bell hooks

“I was a young girl buying bubble gum at the corner store when I first really heard the full name bell hooks. I had just 'talked back' to a grown person. Even now I can recall the surprised look, the mocking tones that informed me I must be kin to bell hooks - a sharp-tongued woman, a woman who spoke her mind, a woman who was not afraid to talk back. I claimed this legacy of defiance, of will, of courage, affirming my link to my female ancestors who were bold and daring in their speech.”
― Bell Hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“Clearly, men need new models for self-assertion that do not require the construction of an enemy “other,”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Since women remain the primary caretakers of children, the facts confirm the reality that given a hierarchal system in a culture of domination which empowers females (like the parent-child relationship) all too often they use coercive force to maintain dominance. In a culture of domination everyone is socialized to see violence as an acceptable means of social control.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“here in this untouched wood
a dirge a lamentation
for earth to live again
earth that is all at once a grave
a resting place a bed of new beginning”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“What we as women need to ask ourselves is: "In what context within patriarchy do women create space where we can protect our genius?" It's a very, very difficult question.”
― bell hooks, Outlaw Culture

“All of us, female and male, have been
socialized from birth on to accept sexist thought and action.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Sexist discrimination has prevented white women from assuming the dominant role in the perpetuation of white racial imperialism , but it has not prevented white 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

“When we see love as the will to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Taught to believe that the mind, not the heart, is the seat of learning, many of us believe that to speak of love with any emotional intensity means we will be perceived as weak and irrational.”
― bell hooks , All About Love: New Visions

“When men did most of the work women worked to make home a site of comfort and relaxation for males. Home was relaxing to women only when men and children were not present.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“As long as sexist thinking socializes boys to be “killers,” whether in imaginary good guy, bad guy fights or as soldiers in imperialism to maintain coercive power over nations, patriarchal violence against women and children will continue.”
― Bell Hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Many people find it helpful to critically examine the past, particularly childhood, to chart their internalization of messages that they were not worthy, not enough, that they were crazy, stupid, monstrous, and so on. Simply learning how we have acquired feelings of worthlessness rarely enables us to change things; it is usually only one stage in the process. I, like so many other people, have found it useful to examine negative thinking and behavioral patterns learned in childhood, particularly those shaping my sense of self and identity. However, this process alone did not ensure self-recovery. It was not enough. I share this because it is far too easy to stay stuck in simply describing, telling one’s story over and over again, which can be a way of holding on to grief about the past or holding on to a narrative that places blame on others.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, “Please do not tell us what you feel.” I have always been a fan of the Sylvia cartoon where two women sit, one looking into a crystal ball as the other woman says, “He never talks about his feelings.” And the woman who can see the future says, “At two P.M. all over the world men will begin to talk about their feelings—and women all over the world will be sorry.”

If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed. It is not just men who do not take their pain seriously. Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings,” some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them. In feminist circles men who wanted to change were often labeled narcissistic or needy. Individual men who expressed feelings were often seen as attention seekers, patriarchal manipulators trying to steal the stage with their drama.

When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability. It stands to reason, then, that the masses of women committed to the sexist principle that men who express their feelings are weak really do not want to hear men speak, especially if what they say is that they hurt, that they feel unloved. Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“One reason women have traditionally gossiped more than men is because gossip has been a social interaction wherein women have felt comfortable stating what they really think and feel. Often, rather than asserting what they think at the appropriate moment, women say what they think will please the listener. Later, they gossip, stating at that moment their true thoughts. This division between a false self invented to please others and a more authentic self need not exist when we cultivate positive self-esteem.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The rugged individual who relies on no one else is a figure who can only exist in a culture of domination where a privileged few use more of the world's resources than the many who must daily do without.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“They persist in our daily life and they undermine our capacity to live fully and joyously. They even prevent us from participating in organized collective struggle aimed at ending domination and transforming society.”
― bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

“…You can’t talk about women’s rights until we include all women. When you deny one woman of her rights, you deny all.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Judging others increases our alienation. When we judge we are less able to forgive. The absence of forgiveness keeps us mired in shame.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Mother love is aplenty and apparent: we complain because we have too much of it. The love of a father is an uncommon gem, to be hunted, burnished, and hoarded. The value goes up because of its scarcity.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Most men are on quest for the ready-made perfect woman because they basically feel that problems in a relationship can’t be worked out. When the slightest thing goes wrong, it seems easier to bolt than talk.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“No one, no matter how intelligent and skillful at critical thinking, is protected against the subliminal suggestions that imprint themselves on our unconscious brain if we are watching hours and hours of television. In the United States television has become primarily a series of spectacles that perpetuate and maintain the ideology of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“When we love we can let our hearts speak”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“From certain standpoints, to travel is to encounter the terrorizing force of white supremacy.”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“… coming to voice is an act of resistance. Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject. Only as subjects can we speak. As objects, we remain voiceless-our beings defined and interpreted by others.”
― bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black