Quote

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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Bell Hooks
Past
Receive
Give
Heal
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Heart
However
Love
Impossible
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Closing
Often
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The greater our commitment, the more likely our love will last.
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Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.
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Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively.
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There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.
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One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.
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The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.
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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.
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I believe that it is impossible for two individuals not committed to their own and each other’s well being to sustain a healthy and enduring relationship.
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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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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.
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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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Being oppressed means the absence of choices
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Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
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Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.
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The word love is most often defined as a noun, yet al the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.
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We all may have prejudices, but we're not all part of a system that reinforces, reinvents and reaffirms itself every day of our lives, systemically.
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If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice.
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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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I think this is what people misunderstand about Martin Luther King saying to love your enemies. They think he was just using this silly little phrase, but what he meant was that as Black Americans we need to let our anger go, because holding on to it we hold ourselves down. We oppress ourselves by holding on to anger.
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