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Quotes by Bell Hooks

Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it's not unfamiliar to you. It's always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.
– Bell Hooks
For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?
– Bell Hooks
For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don't have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community.
– Bell Hooks
I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison.
– Bell Hooks
I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.
– Bell Hooks
I believe that this nation can only heal from the wounds of racism if we all begin to love blackness. And by that I don't mean that we love only that which is best within us, but that we're also able to love that which is faltering, which is wounded, which is contradictory, incomplete.
– Bell Hooks
I feel enormously blessed to be a successful black woman writer in this culture, but I have found my small fame, such as it is, to be very isolating... because I think that especially for black women, the more we rise from the bottom, the more we move and journey, the more we are the targets of the most brutal and vicious attacks.
– Bell Hooks
I feel like there is always something trying to pull us back into sleep, that there is this sort of seductive quality in all the hedonistic pleasures that pull on us.
– Bell Hooks
I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism.
– Bell Hooks
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
I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.
– Bell Hooks
I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.
– Bell Hooks
I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.
– Bell Hooks
I'm such a girl for the living room. I really like to stay in my nest and not move. I travel in my mind, and that that's a rigorous state of journeying for me. My body isn't that interested in moving from place to place.
– Bell Hooks
I've never given up on the mystical dimensions of Christianity. I always laugh at myself because in the morning I sit zazen, but then I always take time to say my Christian prayers at the same time.
– Bell Hooks
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
Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.
– Bell Hooks
Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.
– Bell Hooks
We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they're beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved.
– Bell Hooks
When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.
– Bell Hooks
Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.
– Bell Hooks
The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom...
– Bell Hooks
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
– Bell Hooks
What's really sad is that so many young women between the ages of 16 and 25 are ignorant and they already believe that women get the same pay as men. They don't even really understand that equality hasn't happened with the pay force.
– Bell Hooks
The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.
– Bell Hooks
No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.
– Bell Hooks
I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health.
– Bell Hooks