Bell Hooks Quotes

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

I think that some people like to be someone other than themselves when acting, while others are most themselves. I fall into the second camp. For me, acting is a great exercise in getting to the truth about myself.

As a writer, you rely on whatever makes you up as a person, whether those things are twisted and nasty or otherwise.

A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.

Your real feelings are inside you.

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

The best writing really does come from the deepest, most private part of you.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

Any conversation which does not include the context of the journey of the heart is by definition untrue to who we are as human beings.

What we are, the experiences we've had, come to the surface.

You are what you've been looking for. The answer is always in you alone. There is nothing in the external world. For the external world is an emanation of your own mind, your own thinking and your own imagination. You created this world.

You can't always trust what you think, what you know ... but you can always trust your nature.

I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.

Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.

You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have

I'm really excited to act again because when I started out, there was an innocent sort of perception of the world that was coming though me, and I think now through a lot of experience and life and understanding, I've come full circle to having a purer response to things. So my craft will be really interesting to work from this place because I think acting is about being in tune with yourself - or maybe the struggle to be in tune with yourself.

I think most of us would be horrified to meet ourselves and discover what everyone else already knows about us.

It's a cliché to state that one should think like a child, but it's clear that kids know something that the world tries to make you unlearn later in life.

It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.

Truly know thyself, and to thine own self be true.

your soul is an inner something that is another you and hardly anybody knows what it's really thinkin' except you.

I stood in this unsheltered place, 'til I could see the face behind the face.

I think to be honest, that being is inside. I meet that being in so many people that I meet everywhere in the world and when I do meet that being, in other people, what I want to ask is "How do we keep opening ourselves so that we can become as vulnerable and as willing to live in the deepest complexity and ambiguity and truth that we can?

The real self is who you are when you're at home, when you're comfortable, and the false self is what you're pretending - and the reason you pretend is because you want to create a character for the surroundings you're within.