773 Quotes by Bell Hooks

Woman-identified women, whether straight, bisexual, or lesbian rarely make garnering male approval a priority in our lives. This is why we threaten the patriarchy. Lesbian women who have a patriarchal mindset are far less threatening to men than feminist women, gay or straight, who have turned their gaze and their desire from the patriarchy, away from sexist men.

False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss. We have to expose the falseness of these beliefs to see and accept the reality that suffering and pain do not end when we begin to love. In some cases when we are making the slow journey back from lovelessness to love, our suffering may become more intense. Acceptance of pain is part of loving practice.

There seems to be a fear that if men are raised to be people of integrity, people who can love, they will be unable to be forceful and act violently if needed... We see that females that are raised with the traits any person of integrity embodies can act with tenderness, with assertiveness, and with aggression if and when aggression is needed.

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.

It’s in the act of having to do things that you don’t want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.

Much of what has been perceived by whites as an Amazonic trait in black women has been merely stoical acceptance of situations we have been powerless to change.

Materialism creates a world of narcissism in which the focus of life is solely on acquisition and consumption.

To be oppressed means to be deprived of your ability to choose.

The men in my life have always been the folks who are wary of using the word ‘love’ lightly. They are wary because they believe women make too much of love. And they know that what we think love means is not always what they believe it means. Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word ‘love’ is the source of our difficulty in loving. If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying.