Our hearts connect with lots of folks in a lifetime but most of us will go to our graves with no experience of true love.
People with healthy self-esteem do not need to create pretend identities.
Loving friendships provide us with a space to experience the joy of community in a relationship where we learn to process all our issues, to cope with differences and conflict while staying connected.
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.
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.
Giving generously in romantic relationships, and in all other bonds, means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an important resource.
Couples who rarely or never have sex can know lifelong love.
When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.
It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.
If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love; it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.
Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.
Fluidity means that our black identities are constantly changing as we respond to circumstances in our families and communities of origin, and as we interact with a wider world.
Patriarchy has no gender.
Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know as well as how we use what we know.
Since we live in a society that promotes faddism and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change.
One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.
Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.
The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.
What’s really sad is that so many young women between the ages of 16 and 25 are ignorant and they already believe that women get the same pay as men. They don’t even really understand that equality hasn’t happened with the pay force.
To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.