6 bell hooks Quotes To Carry You

Throughout the course of this year, my personal focus has been on developing a greater understanding of love as it relates to our everyday life and experience as a human. Last winter, my friends led me to read bell hooks 1999’s All About Love New Visions to spend time working on my love ethic while I traveled solo. I had previously spent time with her The Will To Change, when I left my last long term relationship, but my time reading All About Love: New Visions has been gold.

Last Wednesday, we lost bell hooks; she was 69 years old. bell hooks was the pen named that she took on after her great grandmother, her birth name was Gloria Jean Watkins. I’m so glad that her books traveled with me to the many cities I visited and created space for myself.

bell had a fearless way of critically thinking, speaking and inciting change in the mindsets and lives of Black women and beyond. Her 2014 talk at The New School with Cornel West legendary is still a source for clarity and deeper connection to truth. If you haven’t, pick up a bell hooks book today, it will change you.

bell hooks

New York City, 1992

Here are a few bell quotes (click to shop their books) to carry with you as you reflect:

"If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency." Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2000

“True resistance begins with people confronting pain and wanting to do something to change it." Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 1990

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice.” -bell hooks.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” — Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.” -bell hooks.