Quote

When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
Often
Relationships
Firsts
Response
First
Commitment
Relationship
Face
Rather
Sever
Faces
Bonds
Pain
Maintain

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When we are more energized by the practice of blaming than we are by efforts to create transformation, we not only cannot find relief from suffering, we are creating the conditions that help keep us stuck in the status quo
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Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against.
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The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.
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I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal, in ways that blind us to more important issues of life. I just think if we could take all the obsession with the personal (inaudible), and personal judgment and have people be concerned about the environment, what a different world we would live in.
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If you're in a domestic situation where the man is violent, patriarchy and male domination - even though you understand it intersectionally - you focus, you highlight that dimension of it, if that's what is needed to change the situation.
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To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.
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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.
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Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.
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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.
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I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else”. That’s what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you.
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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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. . . no Black woman can become an intellectual without decolonizing her mind.
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Wars make people rich - and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people's lives away from them.
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I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer...education as the practice of freedom.... education that connects the will to know with the will to become. Learning is a place where paradise can be created.
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Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.
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