A Quote by bell hooks

Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it's not unfamiliar to you. It's always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.
I actively pursue experiences that are unlike any others that I've experienced and cultures that I don't know and unfamiliar places and unfamiliar history and things like that.
The greatest mystery in life is not life itself, but death. Death is the culmination of life, the ultimate blossoming of life. In death the whole life is summed up, in death you arrive. Life is a pilgrimage towards death. From the very beginning, death is coming. From the moment of birth, death has started coming towards you, you have started moving towards death.
Death is the door from the superficial life, the so-called life, the trivial. There is a door. If you pass through the door you reach another life - deeper, eternal, without death, deathless. So from so-called life, which is really nothing but dying, one has to pass through the door of death; only then does one achieve a life that is really existential and active - without death in it.
I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.
I present classics in an unfamiliar way or unfamiliar ingredients and preparations in a classical way.
What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.
It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.
The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.
The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.
With every failure, every crisis, every difficult time, I say - What is this here to teach me? And as soon as you get the lesson, you get to move on. If you really get the lesson, you pass and you don't have to repeat the class. My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.
Not moving because things are unfamiliar-and you haven't bothered to learn how to operate on them-I think is really a crime. The uncertain is the unknown and the unknown is the future, and you cannot predict the future. But the unfamiliar? You can learn how to operate in that.
That's the artist's role - to strike out always for something new, to break away, to defy, to... grapple with the unfamiliar.
Laughter. Yes, laughter is the Zen attitude towards death and towards life too, because life and death are not separate. Whatsoever is your attitude towards life will be your attitude towards death, because death comes as the ultimate flowering of life. Life exists for death. Life exists through death. Without death there will be no life at all. Death is not the end but the culmination, the crescendo. Death is not the enemy it is the friend. It makes life possible.
Each moment is new. We have never lived it before and will never live it again. It is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
Producing a film is more unfamiliar territory. Although producing an album and overseeing artists is a task within itself. But film is unfamiliar territory so, here and now, that's more difficult.
I don't think poetry needs to be "easily understandable." First of all, there are often complexities of syntax, form, unfamiliar absences, etc., that require a deeper concentration than is usually demanded of us. So that, right off the bat, is a little difficult. Then there is the deeper issue of what poetry is really asking of us. I feel it is asking us to read with great, even sacred, care and attention. That, too, is difficult. It requires discipline and the creation of a temporary zone of privacy, which is inimical to our current conditions of life.
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