All my life I have longed to have a loving relationship that would last a lifetime. — Bell Hooks

Clearly, commitment is a necessary component for creating loving relationships. — Bell Hooks

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. — Bell Hooks

Living simply makes loving simple. — Bell Hooks

Language is also a place of struggle. — Bell Hooks

Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind. — Bell Hooks

Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels. — Bell Hooks

I often find it easier to be teaching or giving to others, and often struggle with the place of my own pleasure and joy. — Bell Hooks

I feel sad that we have allowed these knee–jerk feminists who want to act like it’s a struggle against men…but again that’s the least politically developed strand of feminism. — Bell Hooks

We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent. — Bell Hooks

Feminism as a political movement has to specifically address the needs of men in their struggle to revolutionize their consciousness. — Bell Hooks

Whenever domination is present, love is lacking. — Bell Hooks

Without justice there can be no love. — Bell Hooks

The greater our commitment, the more likely our love will last. — Bell Hooks

Couples who rarely or never have sex can know lifelong love. — Bell Hooks

I love my family, even as I critique their dysfunctionalities. — Bell Hooks

The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination. — Bell Hooks

To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds. — Bell Hooks

Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition. — Bell Hooks

The people I love, I’m committed to loving for the rest of my life. — Bell Hooks

Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart. — Bell Hooks

Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust. — Bell Hooks

Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself. — Bell Hooks

Love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved. — Bell Hooks

We don’t really live in a culture that loves boys or loves children, and we don’t encourage boys to be whole. — Bell Hooks

Remember, care is a dimension of love, but simply giving care does not mean we are loving. — Bell Hooks

The wounded heart learns self–love by first overcoming low self–esteem. — Bell Hooks

Love is an action, never simply a feeling. — Bell Hooks

Spirituality and spiritual life give us the strength to love. — Bell Hooks

Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair. — Bell Hooks

Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love. — Bell Hooks

Love is first and foremost exemplified by action–by practice–not solely by feeling. — Bell Hooks

The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom… — Bell Hooks

If we give our children sound self–love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them. — Bell Hooks

I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love. — Bell Hooks

In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable. — Bell Hooks

Privacy is … connected to a politics of domination. — Bell Hooks

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence. — Bell Hooks

I guess I wish we could talk about: what does it mean to have a politics of intersectionality that also privileges what form of domination is most oppressing us at a given moment in time. — Bell Hooks

The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution. — Bell Hooks

I think Black people need to take self–esteem seriously. — Bell Hooks

It is crucial for the future of the Black liberation struggle that we remain ever mindful that ours is a shared struggle, that we are each other’s fate. — Bell Hooks

Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims. — Bell Hooks

There is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress, and pain of constant exploitation and oppression. — Bell Hooks

In this culture, the phrase ‘black woman’ is not synonymous with ‘tender,’ or ‘gentle.’ It’s as if those words couldn’t possibly speak to the reality of black females. — Bell Hooks

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self–determination. — Bell Hooks

Fluidity means that our black identities are constantly changing as we respond to circumstances in our families and communities of origin, and as we interact with a wider world. — Bell Hooks

In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love. — Bell Hooks

While it has become ‘cool’ for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism. — Bell Hooks

Sexism has always been a political stance mediating social domination, enabling white men and black men to share a common sensibility about sex roles and the importance of male domination. — Bell Hooks

Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal. — Bell Hooks

What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy. — Bell Hooks

The ethic of liberal individualism has so deeply permeated the psyches of blacks… of all classes that we have little support for a political ethic of communalism that promotes the sharing of resources. — Bell Hooks

When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention, a disruption of white control over black images. — Bell Hooks

If anything I think postmodernism has the least impact on my work. — Bell Hooks

My work is mostly influenced by the concrete circumstances of our daily lives. — Bell Hooks

Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self–loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well–being. — Bell Hooks

All the work I do is built on a foundation of loving–kindness. Love illuminates matters. — Bell Hooks

I’m lucky. I think it’s good that I have a body of work that addresses different things in different ways. — Bell Hooks

When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self–love, it nurtures our growth. — Bell Hooks

My focus has always been on the work–that work being critical thinking and writing. I am always doing that. That’s where I am, wherever I am. Critical thinking and writing as my heartbeat. — Bell Hooks

Within a capitalist consumer society, the cult of personality has the power to subsume ideas, to make the person, the personality into the product and not the work itself. — Bell Hooks

To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination. — Bell Hooks

One of the things I find most exciting is talking with people who are working with my work. Who are using it in some way with their life to address everyday politics of meaning. — Bell Hooks

To the extent that we live in a postmodern world and it shapes the concrete circumstances of our daily lives, I would say postmodernism affects my work or influences my work. — Bell Hooks

The world demands that you work for it, make families, provide, take no time to listen to your own heart beating. — Bell Hooks

What’s so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy. — Bell Hooks

It really fascinates me what white people are allowed to write about. — Bell Hooks

You are not going to destroy this imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy by creating your own version of it. — Bell Hooks

Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis. — Bell Hooks

We don’t hear much from revolutionary feminists who are white because they’re not serving the bourgeois agenda of the status quo. — Bell Hooks

We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic. — Bell Hooks

As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing. — Bell Hooks

No Black woman can become an intellectual without decolonizing her mind. — Bell Hooks

Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune. — Bell Hooks

Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever, that’s feminism. — Bell Hooks

Feminism as a theoretical enterprise is approached differently by Black women depending on where we are. There are more reformist Black women who tend to use the phrase ‘Black feminism’. — Bell Hooks

No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much’. Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’…No woman has ever written enough. — Bell Hooks

To me, a woman can’t be a feminist just because she is a woman. She is a feminist because she begins to divest herself of sexist ways of thinking and revolutionizes her consciousness. — Bell Hooks

Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against. — Bell Hooks

Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed their strength or exploited it. — Bell Hooks

Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us. — Bell Hooks

Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now … based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity. — Bell Hooks

I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health. — Bell Hooks

White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or … and oppression of others. — Bell Hooks

When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. — Bell Hooks

Reviewing the literature on love I noticed how few writers, male or female, talk about the impact of patriarchy, the way in which male domination of women and children stands in the ways of love. — Bell Hooks

I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other. — Bell Hooks

As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized. — Bell Hooks

The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women’s studies classes and said, ‘Black women have always worked. — Bell Hooks

I’m tired of the naked, raped, beaten black woman body. I want to see an image of black femaleness that alters our universe in some way. — Bell Hooks

I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that’s becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism. — Bell Hooks

Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things. — Bell Hooks

Part of the heart of anarchy is, dare to go against the grain of the conventional ways of thinking about our realities. Anarchists have always gone against the grain, and that’s been a place of hope. — Bell Hooks

Sadly, children’s passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only. — Bell Hooks

Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life. — Bell Hooks

Most gay men are as sexist in their thinking as are heterosexuals. Their patriarchal thinking leads them to construct paradigms of desirable sexual behaviour that is similar to that of patriarchal straight men. — Bell Hooks

It’s interesting to look at all the aspects where everyday Americans, many of whom are not college educated, are thinking deeply now about our economic structure. — Bell Hooks

All over the world, young males and females, schooled in the art of patriarchal thinking, are building an identity on a foundation that sees the will to do violence as the essential way to assert being. — Bell Hooks