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. ”

I have always been a flirt. My mother says whe I was a child, I used to stand outside the house and just smile at everyone who walked by. Like, 'Please take me with you!' ”

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. ”

You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change. ”

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

Class is more than money. Class is also about knowledge. ”

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. ”

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? ”

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. ”

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. ”