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as females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love most of us were and are slaves of longing-- yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
Free
Slaves
Culture
Claim
Cannot
Longing
Love
Master
Claims
Slave
Patriarchal
Female
Females
Masters
Yearning

More quotes by Bell Hooks

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I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health.
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I gather together the dreams, fantasies, experiences that preoccupied me as a girl, that stay with me and appear and reappear in different shapes and forms in all my work. Without telling everything that happened, they document all that remains most vivid.
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The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.
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The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies. Living consciously is living with a core of healthy self-esteem. You will face reality, you will not delude yourself.
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Part of why I have started writing about love is feeling that our culture is forgetting what Martin Luther King taught. We name more and more streets and schools after him but that's almost irrelevant, because what is to be remembered is that strength to love.
Bell Hooks
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To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.
Bell Hooks
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Readers forget that one can critique yet still admire.
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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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. . .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
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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
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Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us.
Bell Hooks
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To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial. It is a form of psychic violence that prepares us to accept the violence needed to ensure the maintenance of imperialist, future-oriented society.
Bell Hooks
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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
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It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.
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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Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.
Bell Hooks
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Dare to look at the intersectionalities.
Bell Hooks
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Often girls feel deeply cared about as small children but then find as we develop willpower and independent thought that the world stops affirming us, that we are seen as unlovable.
Bell Hooks