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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.

Bell Hooks

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More quotes by Bell Hooks

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Professors rarely speak of the place of eros or the erotic in our classrooms. Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present, and not the body.
Bell Hooks
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The challenge these days, is to be somewhere, to belong to some particular place, invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell in a community.
Bell Hooks
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I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life) to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.
Bell Hooks
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Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.
Bell Hooks
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Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
Bell Hooks
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All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like..I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to actually practice.
Bell Hooks
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Giving generously in romantic relationships, and in all other bonds, means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an important resource.
Bell Hooks
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I think part of Western metaphysical dualism is, we're always being asked to choose one over the other.
Bell Hooks
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When I write provocative social and cultural criticism that causes readers to stretch their minds, to think beyond set paradigms, I think of that work as love in action. While it may challenge, disturb and at times even frighten or enrage readers, love is always the place where I begin and end.
Bell Hooks
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One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.
Bell Hooks
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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
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I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions - a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.
Bell Hooks
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Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves oppressed, no one would have taken them seriously.
Bell Hooks
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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
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Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.
Bell Hooks
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While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages connection. Lerner points out that we do not usually know the emotional costs of keeping a secret until the truth is disclosed. Usually, secrecy involves lying. And lying is always the setting for potential betrayal and violation of trust.
Bell Hooks
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I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.
Bell Hooks
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Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.
Bell Hooks
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Most of us find it difficult to accept a definition of love that says we are never loved in a context where there is abuse.
Bell Hooks
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Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.
Bell Hooks