Ibukun Adeleye

“How different things might be if, rather than saying "I think I'm in love," we were saying "I've connected with someone in a way that makes me think I'm on the way to knowing love." Or if instead of saying "I am in love" we say "I am loving" or "I will love." Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love's path is communication.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man is ugly,' Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun