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“When I say I have a crush on you, what I'm saying is that I'm in love with the distance between us. I'm not in love with you: I don't even know you. I'm in love with the escape that fantasizing about you promises.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.... An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught that we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as we were also taught to believe that we were loved. For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families. Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“It seems to me that if you are someone who leaves, then you must always be leaving, because to stop leaving is to stay, which holds its own consequences. The space between leaving and staying, I think, is called longing.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth… Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions