Communion Quotes

“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“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.”
― Bell Hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“The time has come to tell the truth. Again. There is no love without justice. Men and women who cannot be just deny themselves and everyone they choose to be intimate with the freedom to know mutual love. If we remain unable to imagine a world where love can be recognized as a unifying principle that can lead us to seek and use power wisely, then we will remain wedded to a culture of domination that requires us to choose power over love.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Nothing indicts female allegiance to patriarchy more than the willingness to behave as though the problems created by cultural investment in sexist thinking about the nature of male and female roles can be solved by women's working harder.”
― Bell Hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“I had the strength to rebel, but I did not have the strength to let go.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“And when we love, we know love will last. Significantly, we know, having learned through much trial and error, that true love begins with self-love. And that time and time again our search for love brings us back to the place where we started, back to our own heart's mirror, where we can look upon our female selves with love and be renewed.”
― Bell Hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Heightened awareness often gives the illusion that a problem is lessening. This is most often not the case. It may mean simply that a problem has become so widespread it can no longer remain hidden or be ignored.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Women have greater freedom than ever before, and yet it is not clear whether that freedom has given us greater access to true love. It is not clear how that freedom has changed the nature of romance and partnerships.”
― Bell Hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Women talk about love. From girlhood on, we learn that conversations about love are a gendered narrative, a female subject...Femaleness in patriarchal culture marks us from the very beginning as unworthy or not as worthy, and it should come as no surprise that we learn to worry most as girls, as women, about whether we are worthy of love.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Romance is different when two people approach each other from the space of knowledge rather than absolute mystery. No matter how well we get to know someone else, there is always a realm of mystery. Old ideas about romantic love taught females and males to believe that erotic tension depended on the absence of communication and understanding. This misinformation about the nature of love has helped to further the politics of domination, particularly male domination of women. Without knowing one other, we can never experience intimacy.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Significantly, romantic friendships can coexist with the fact of partners' marrying because their reason for being is not to replace marriage but to open the possibility of sustained, committed true love existing among friends, and not just same-sex friends. No matter that our chosen relationship commitments change. Those of us who have long-term romantic friendships, some that have lasted longer than any of our marriages or partnerships, do not fear that these commitments will falter if we create primary bonds.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“How can any girl sustain the belief that she is loved, truly loved, when all around her she sees that femaleness is despised? Unable to change the fact of femaleness, she strives to make herself over, to become someone worthy of love.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Men did care enough to struggle with our demands. And some cared enough to convert to feminist thinking and to change. But only a very, very few loved us – loved us all the way. And that meant respecting our sexual rights. To this day I believe that feminist debate about love and sexuality ended precisely because straight women did not want to face the reality that it was highly unlikely in patriarchal society that a majority of men would wholeheartedly embrace women’s right to say no in the bedroom. Since the vast majority of heterosexual women, even those involved in radical feminist movement, were not willing to say no when they did not want to perform sexually for the fear of upsetting or alienating their mate, no significant group of men ever had to rise to the occasion. While it became more acceptable to say no now and then, it was not acceptable to say no for any significant amount of time. An individual woman in a primary relationship with a man could not say no, because she feared there was always another woman in the background who could take her place, a woman who would never say no.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Let's not kid ourselves, we find mutual love only when we know how to love. And the best place to start practicing the art of love is with the self--that body, mind, heart, and soul that we can most know and change.
The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourselves. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin....rather than embracing faulty thinking that encourages us to believe that females are inherently loving, we make the choice to become loving. Choosing love, we affirm our agency, our commitment to personal growth, our emotional openness.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“The fact that men use emotional withholding as a weapon of psychological terrorism is never discussed.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“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

“Uniting the search for love with the quest to be free was the crucial step. Searching for love, I found the path to freedom. Learning how to be free was the first step in learning to know love.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Not only do we want to rescue our mothers but also we want to change our destiny so we will never suffer the way they did or do.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“What we were was emotionally needy, desperate for the recognition (whether from male or female partners) that would prove our worth, our value, our right to be alive on the planet, and we were willing to do anything to get it. As females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love; most of us were and are slaves of longing—yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“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

“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

“Most feminist groups began with women talking about how we saw ourselves and other women, how we acted. We openly confessed our fears and hatred of other women. We talked about how to combat jealousy, the politics of envy, and so on.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Somehow, as we made our entrance into the realm of young womanhood, we began to lose power. Fascinating research on girlhood is happening these days. It confirms that young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“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

“I was torn between my desire to follow the dictates of my inner self and my distrust of that self.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“I wanted to find my own identity and be autonomous at the same time that I wanted to find a mate who would rescue me, who would provide and protect. Of course I wanted to be able to provide for myself. Just in case that did not happen, I wanted the luxury of backup. I was not a free spirit. I wanted to blend old-fashioned values learned at home—which cautioned me to be conservative, take care, and be responsible—with New Age spirituality and radical ideas of freedom and choice. No matter how much I might have longed to free myself from a sense of responsibility to the collective good, to family and community, I was psychically bound. I had the strength to rebel, but I did not have the strength to let go. I was, like generations of women before me, split, torn between two competing identities—the longing to be the liberated, independent, sexually free woman and the desire to settle down and be domesticated.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love