bell hooks

For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future.

I feel our nation’s turning away from love as intensely as I felt love’s abandonment in my girlhood.

All About Love: New Visions provides radical new ways to think about the art of loving, offering a hopeful, joyous vision of love’s transformative power. It lets us know what we must do to love again.

Lerner’s The Dance of Deception.

Harriet Lerner reminds readers that honesty is only one aspect of truth telling—that it is equated with “moral excellence:

our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy.

Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason many of us will never know love. It is impossible to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth when the core of one’s being and identity is shrouded in secrecy and lies.

Practically every mental health care practictioner, from the most erudite psychoanalysts to untrained self-help gurus, tell us that it is infinitely more fulfilling and we are all saner if we tell the truth, yet most of us are not rushing to stand up and be counted among the truth tellers.

Commitment to knowing love can protect us by keeping us
wedded to a life of truth, willing to share ourselves openly and fully in both private and public life.

Then when men began to share their thoughts and feelings, some women could not cope. They wanted the old lies and pretenses to be back in place.