#All About Love

[sodomyaspraxis]

“As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. 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.”

-bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2001)

[mun-dane]

All About Love, bell hooks

[galactamelanin]

[theacademiccottage]

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, “

- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

[houseofpurplestars]

"When the practice of love 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."

- bell hooks, "all about love"

[thediaryofarevolutionist]

- Simone de Beauvoir „the second sex“

She is literally describing me

[lets-get-lit]

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

- bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

[chandajaan]

You know what truly fucks me over about podcast incel bros and traditional older women or basically anyone who wants to convince you that romantic relationship should be suffering and hard work? Is that you mom's going to die. Everyone you love will die, we live in a world of capitalism, greed and genocide and some dude wants you to 'submit' to him? Life is already so hard, and you cannot convince me of a love that is anything but healing, tender and easy.

[bypatia]

book recs no one asked for: always coming home by ursula k le guin, why we swim by bonnie tsui, a thousand splendid suns by khaled hosseini, if you want feminist soul-changing, hopepunk, touches the veil of life reads, and educated by tara westover, all about love by bell hooks, the year of magical thinking by joan didion if you want real, visceral takes on love, grief, and being the master of your own fate, bye

[birdiethepoet]

the crush i have right now has allowed me, perhaps for the first time in my life, to understand why love and romance are so spectacular, why people chase it and why our lives have been socialised to adore it. it’s the sweetness you taste in mango perfectly juicy and ripe, eating it piece by piece as you lay in the grass, the sun kissing your cheeks, nose, forehead, neck, and lips with golden light. or, the warmth you feel a december night by an old hearth, sipping tea as the rain beats down on the panes near you, hiding underneath woollen blankets to read. this strange, overwhelming sensation of peace and joy suddenly hits you out of thin air. but above all else, it’s the heaviness of your entire heart bearing down into your skeleton and the gentle pain in your ever-tightening chest. the physicality of this yearning radiates throughout your entire body, from chest to stomach to lungs. breathe and you’re breathing deeper into the hunger of your desire. exist at all and you’re giving in. and it’s strange, and it’s phenomenal, and i don’t understand it at all. how am i enamoured by someone so deeply my body aches in wake and sleep? and i’ve never understood the purpose or joy of romance until now, until i liked someone so much that knowing them feels sickening and disorientating and terrifyingly beautiful.

[onlyindreams]

thank you bell hooks for basically saying that i CAN fix him 😝🫶

[whenweallvote]

“There can be no love without justice…” — All About Love

Happy heavenly 71st birthday to bell hooks. Thank you for always sharing your truth and wisdom with the world. 🤍

[mun-dane]

[theannotatedbook]

"Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love. Often, in their adult relationships, these men act out again and again to test their partner's love. While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother's love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love. This testing does not heal the wound of the past. It merely reenacts it, for ultimately, the woman will become weary of being tested and end the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment."

-- "All About Love: New Visions" by bell hooks

[hangsawoman]

get them for me bell hooks