Jiea Monique > Jiea's Quotes

“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.
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― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love. Often in their adult relationships these men act out again and again to test their partner's love. While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother's love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love. This testing does not heal the wound of the past, it merely reenacts it, for ultimately the woman will become weary of being tested and end the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment. This drama confirms for many men that they cannot put their trust in love. They decide that it is better to put their faith in being powerful, in being dominant.”
― bell hooks

“If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“did not. And knowing this, it was natural that I look to my father, for in him, I saw an emblem of another life—one of splendor and regale. And I knew I had a brother up there, a boy who luxuriated while I labored, and I wondered what right he had to his life of idle pursuit, and what law deeded me to the Task.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“a portion of the manor’s charm. But I now knew the truth—that Maynard’s folly, though more profane, was unoriginal. The masters could not bring water to boil, harness a horse, nor strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them—we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“And as I mounted each step, I felt the terrible logic of the Task, my Task, snap into place.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“The gazelle does not match claws with the lion—he runs. But we did more than run. We”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave. Corrine was no different, and it was why, relentless as she was against slavery, she could so casually condemn me to the hole, condemn Georgie Parks to death, and mock an outrage put upon Sophia. I had not put it together like this in that moment. What”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“Then, I didn’t know that our bodies can know things before they happen, so when my eyes suddenly filled with tears, I thought this was the unpredictable effect of emotion.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“When a man wails like that you know it’s all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirit just last year. As Roy howled, my fingers kept worrying a rough patch of skin beneath my chin, a souvenir of scar tissue. When”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage