Salvation Quotes

“Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“Wisely, Baldwin insisted that we are always more than our pain. Not only did he believe in our capacity to love, he felt black people were uniquely situated to risk loving because we had suffered.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“Valuing ourselves rightly means we understand love to be the only foundation of being that will sustain us in both times of lack and times of plenty”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“For black men of all ages it is more acceptable to express rage than to give voice to emotional needs.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“Who we are as African-Americans, as black folks in the diaspora, our cultural destiny, has been shaped by both the enslaved and the free.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“With this understanding of love’s meaning it is clear that more often than not slavery made it all but impossible for black people to love one another. When emotional ties were established between individuals, when children were born to enslaved mothers and fathers, these attachments were often severed. No matter the tenderness of connection, it was often overshadowed by the trauma of abandonment and loss.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“love does not bring an end to difficulties, it gives us the strength to cope with difficulties in a constructive way.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“While masking was sometimes crucial to survival during the period of racial apartheid, those strategies destroy our capacity to be truth tellers when we adopt them in contemporary life.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“Shame makes self-acceptance and self-love impossible.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“Until black people, and our allies in love and struggle, become militant about how we are represented on television, in movies, and in books, we will not see imaginative work that offers images of black characters who love. If love is not present in our imaginations, it will not be there in our lives.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“Emotionally shut-down black males are often represented as epitomizing desirable masculinity.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“I tell them that love is always there–that nothing can keep us from love if we dare to seek it and to treasure what we find.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“When he was alive, Marlon Riggs, activist, scholar, and filmmaker, used to insist in conversations with me and Essex [Hemphill] that “black men loving black men was the most revolutionary act.” To Marlon this statemen t was an affirmation of the importance of self-love. He believed that a self-hating individual black male, irrespective of his sexual preference, would never be able to love another black male. While I agree that anyone mired in self-hate cannot love anyone, I used to tell him that the “most revolutionary act” black men could make was to deal psychoanalytically with their childhoods.” For it is in childhood that so many black males, gay and straight, come to fear masculinity and manhood. This fear is often based on painful and abusive interaction between fathers and/or male parental caretakers and sons.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“That huge majority of black folks who identify as Christian or as believers in other religious faiths (Islam, Buddhism, Yoruba, and so on) need to return to sacred writings about love and embrace these as guides showing us the way to lead our lives.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love