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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

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Bell Hooks
Perfect
Fear
Xenophobic
Means
Fundamentalism
Without
Tortured
Mean
Nationalism
Love
Increasingly
Thinking
Notion
World
Becoming

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I think this is often misunderstood in the West, where people feel that there can be no justice unless everything is the same. This is part of why I feel we have to relearn how we think about love, because we think about love so much in terms of the self.
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But love is really more of an interactive process. It's about what we do not just what we feel. It's a verb, not a noun.
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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.
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It is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance.
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I have been contemplating the place and meaning of love in our lives and culture for years. When a subject attracts my intellectual and emotional imagination, I am long to observe it from all angles, to know it inside and out.
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I think inequality is in our minds. I think this is what we learn through practice... The bridge of illusion must be shattered in order for a real bridge to be constructed. One of the things we learn is that inequality is an illusion.
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Without justice there can be no love.
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