bell hooks Love Is Quotations

The capacity to love is tied to being able to be awake, to being able to move out of yourself and be with someone else in a manner that is not about your desire to possess them, but to be with them, to be in union and communion.

Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair.

Whenever domination is present, love is lacking.

Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.

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.

Love is an action, never simply a feeling.

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.

The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our ‘natural’ condition.

A central theme of all about love is that from childhood into adulthood we are often taught misguided and false assumptions about the nature of love. Perhaps the most common false assumption about love is that love means we will not be challenged or changed.

Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.

When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.

The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.

Love is first and foremost exemplified by action - by practice - not solely by feeling.

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.

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.