Anger prevents love and isolates the one who is angry. It is an attempt, often successful, to push away what is most longed for — companionship and u… - bell hooks

Contrary to what some folks would have us believe, it is not tragic, even if undesirable, for a person to leave a liberal arts education not having read major works from this canon. Their lives are not ending. And the exciting dimension of knowledge is that we can learn a work without formally studying it. If a student graduates without reading Shakespeare and then reads or studies this work later, it does not delegitimize whatever formal course of study that was completed.

Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. [...] Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. [...] Fear promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies with sameness, then difference will appear as a threat. When we choose love, we move against fear and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect to find ourselves in the other.

If we are lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who love us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common. It may be that this double sense of singular integrity and of communal belonging is our personal standard of health for as long as we live…we seem to know instinctively that health is not divided.