Aki > Aki's Quotes

“feminism is for everybody”
― bell hooks

“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.' Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.”
― bell hooks

“Feminist education — the feminist classroom — is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university.”
― Bell Hooks

“I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.”
― Bell Hooks

“If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.”
― Bell Hooks

“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.”
― Bell Hooks

“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.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”
― Robert Frost

“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
― Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

“The best way out is always through.”
― Robert Frost

“I'm not confused. I'm just well mixed.”
― Robert Frost

“Anything more than the truth would be too much.”
― Robert Frost

“I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.”
― Amy Tan

“I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind.
-Lindo”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.
-An-mei”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water. ”
― Amy Tan

“But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.
-Jing-mei”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“But I was no longer sacared. I could see what was inside me.
-Lindo”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the sou. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true....If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses. ”
― Amy Tan

“So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. the pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and giver her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.”
― Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning

“Too many good things all seem the same after a while. ”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“But I don't have anything left inside of me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it's to know what's possible to want.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“Your life is what you see in front of you.
-An-mei”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.”
― bell hooks

“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
― Toni Morrison

“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
― Toni Morrison