bell hooks Quotes

If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them.

There is a lushness to how my mind works.

I can be standing in Barneys with my coat and purse and my selections, and some white woman will say, ‘Can you get this in my size?’ What she sees is a black woman, and her service button goes off.

Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever, that’s feminism.

These days I wonder more and more why people are pessimistic when American history actually supports optimism.

What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.

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.

All the men I fall for seem to have a commitment problem.

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.

Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.

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.

Using pseudonyms was such a part of the early feminist movement. We didn’t want to have this star system. We wanted attention on the ideas, not the persona of the writer.

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.

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.

It really fascinates me what white people are allowed to write about.

An often-repeated assertion in the body of film criticism I have written is the assertion that movies do not just mirror the culture of any given time; they also create it.

I told my parents when I was 12 I’d be a writer.