Best Of bell hooks's "all about love: new visions"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from all about love: new visions by bell hooks.


Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling […] When the practice of live invites us to enter a place of potential bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain, many of us turn our backs on love. 

p.114


Living simply makes loving simple. The choice to live simply necessarily enhances our capacity to love. It is the way we learn to practice compassion, daily affirming our connection to a world community. 

p.125


Giving is the way we also learn how to receive. The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love. A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.

p. 164


When one knows a true love, the transformative force of that love lasts even when we no longer have the company of the person  with whom we experienced profound spiritual care and growth. Thomas Merton writes: “we discover our true selves in love.” Many of us are not ready to accept and embrace our true selves, particularly when living with integrity alienates us from our familiar worlds.

p. 187


Accepting death with love means we embrace the reality of the unexpected, of experiences over which we have no control. Love empowers us to surrender. We do not need to ave endless anxiety and worry about whether we will fulfill our goals and plans. Death is always there to remind us that our plans are transitory. By Learning to love, we learn to accept change. Without change, we cannot grow. Our will to grow in spirit and truth is how we stand between life and death, ready to choose life.

p. 204-205


Without “falling in love”, we can recognize that moment of mysterious connection between our soul and that of another person as love’s attempt to call us back to our true selves. Intensely connecting with another soul, we are made bold and courageous. Using that fearless will to bond and connect as a catalyst for choosing and committing ourselves to love, we are able to love truly and deeply, to give and receive a love that lasts, a love that is “stronger than death”.

p. 188


In Soul Food: Stories to Nourish the Spirit and the Heart, Jack Kornfield and Christina Feldman write that we too can choose serenity in the midst of struggle: “In the calmness we begin to understand that peace is not the opposite of challenge and hardship. We understand that the presence of light is not a result of darkness ending. Peace is not found not in the absence of challenge but in our own capacity to be with hardship without judgment, prejudice, and resistance. We discover that we have the energy and faith to heal ourselves, an d the world, through an openheartedness in this movement.”

p. 230


To live well  is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just the romantic bonds. I know individuals who accept dishonesty in their primary relationships, or who are themselves dishonest in their primary relationships or who are themselves dishonest, when the would never accept it in friendships. Satisfying friendships in which we share mutual love provides a guide for behaviour in other relationships, including romantic ones. They provide us all with a way to know community.

p. 138


Popular posts from this blog

9 Reasons Why Zack on Gilmore Girls is the Worst

Image
Of all the men in the Gilmore Girls world, I think Zack was the worst. Here's nine reasons why. I'm currently re-watching Gilmore girls for the umpteenth time, and once more I find myself loathing Zack in particular. Normally we all get caught up in Luke vs. Christopher, Dean vs. Jess vs. Logan, etc, but I think these debates distract viewers from realizing that Zack is the worst Significant Other of all the women in the show. I think the actor Todd Lowe does a great job portraying Zack, so my critique is def not his performance , my issue is the  character of Zack   who is sooo contemptible. In a way, Lowe's performance of Zack is all the more remarkable - when it comes to the Bad Men of Gilmore Girls, Zack rarely tops the list. I think it's because his many flaws are so *shrug* boys will be boys. As viewers I think we're meant to be distracted by the explosive incidents related to Logan's elitism, Mitchum's tyranny, Dean's cheating, Marty's obvio
Read more

Best of Helen Oyeyemi's "Peaces"

Image
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi. Painting above: The Lovers by Leonora Carrington (c.1987) You run the romantic gauntlet for decades without knowing who exactly it is you're giving and taking such a battering in order to reach. You run the gauntlet without knowing whether the person whose favour you seek will even be there once you somehow put that path strewn with sensory confetti and emotional gore behind you. And then, by some stroke of fortune the gauntlet concludes, the person does exist after all, and you become that perpetually astonished lover from so many of the songs you used to find endlessly disingenuous. p.5 If you stuck out your tongue it would dance there, right at the top: the fizz of conditionality. p.7 I'm sure almost no one deludes themselves that all their ancestors were decent. Pick a vein, any vein: mud mixed with lightning that flows through, an unruly fusion of bad blood and good. p.16 And then there's the look i
Read more

"...the scale of my ambition"

Image
  above: from King by Florence + the Machine I'm increasingly/always thinking derision of ambition as a legacy of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, here are a few quotes below--Pemberton and Smith are Black, Whyte is not. Back then, being ambitious wasn't cool. Many of the bands were perfectly happy just trying to meet women and drink beer. You were expected to have that Canadian attitude of false humility. Even if you thought what you were doing was good or interesting, you could never verbalize it. It wasn't that far removed from the '90s slacker era where the preferred pose was aloofness. - from Bedroom Rapper: Cadence Weapon on Hip-Hop, Resistance, and Surviving the Music Industry by Rollie Pemberton Ambition ultimately withers all secrets in its glare before those secrets have had time to come to life from within and then thwarts the generosity and maturity that ripens the discourse of a lifetime's dedication to work. - from Consolations: T
Read more