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Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix and transform.

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
Meaning
Words
Writing
Deepen
Illuminate
Transform
Performing

More quotes by Bell Hooks

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Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.
Bell Hooks
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Readers forget that one can critique yet still admire.
Bell Hooks
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Love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.
Bell Hooks
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My idea of a delicious time is to read a book that is wonderful. But the ruling passion of my life is being a seeker after truth and the divine.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.
Bell Hooks
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All the work I do is built on a foundation of loving-kindness. Love illuminates matters.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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Given the way universities work to reinforce and perpetuate the status quo, the way knowledge is offered as commodity, Women's Studies can easily become the place where revolutionary feminist thought and feminist activism are submerged or made secondary to the goals of academic careerism
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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I think we have to talk about educating the people for critical consciousness about what anarchy is.
Bell Hooks
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If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.
Bell Hooks
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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.
Bell Hooks
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There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.
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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Loving friendships provide us with a space to experience the joy of community in a relationship where we learn to process all our issues, to cope with differences and conflict while staying connected.
Bell Hooks
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The greater our commitment, the more likely our love will last.
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