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Writing and the hope of writing pulls me back from the edges of despair. I believe insanity and despair are at times one and the same.

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
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More quotes by Bell Hooks

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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.
Bell Hooks
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Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.
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 Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.
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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If we move away from either/or thinking, and if we think, okay, every day of my life that I walk out of my house I am a combination of race, gender, class, sexual preference and religion or what have you, what gets foregrounded?
Bell Hooks
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Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.
Bell Hooks
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For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.
Bell Hooks
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When I write provocative social and cultural criticism that causes readers to stretch their minds, to think beyond set paradigms, I think of that work as love in action. While it may challenge, disturb and at times even frighten or enrage readers, love is always the place where I begin and end.
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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This rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word “patriarchy.” Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionaliz ed gender roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial. And how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named?
Bell Hooks
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I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life) to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.
Bell Hooks
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It is poetry that changes everything.
Bell Hooks
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To the extent that we live in a postmodern world and it shapes the concrete circumstances of our daily lives, I would say postmodernism affects my work or influences my work.
Bell Hooks
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It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.
Bell Hooks
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I feel sad that we have allowed these knee-jerk feminists who want to act like it's a struggle against men...but again that's the least politically developed strand of feminism.
Bell Hooks
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feminism is for everybody
Bell Hooks
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The world would be a paradise of peace and justice if global citizens shared a common definition of love which would guide our thoughts and action.
Bell Hooks
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I am passionate about everything in my life--first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society. --bell hooks
Bell Hooks
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What's so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy.
Bell Hooks