Time & Perspective Quote by Bell Hooks

Hooks flips the usual terror-script: death isn’t the stranger at the door, it’s the roommate who’s been paying rent the whole time. The line works because it refuses the melodrama of mortality as an “event” and recasts it as an atmosphere, a condition that quietly structures every ordinary decision. “You get deeper in it as you move towards it” sounds almost geological, as if aging is sedimentation rather than a sudden cliff. The shock comes in the pivot: what’s alien isn’t death but life, once you “pass away from the moment.” Hooks isn’t talking about the afterlife so much as the ongoing practice of not being present.

The subtext is political as much as existential. Hooks spent a career arguing that domination thrives on disconnection: from our bodies, from community, from love as an ethic. Read that way, “passing away from the moment” names a kind of social death that precedes the biological one: living on autopilot, numbed by consumer pace, trauma, and the daily micro-withdrawals demanded by racism and patriarchy. If death is familiar, it’s because structures of power rehearse it in advance, teaching people to shrink, to self-abandon, to treat aliveness as optional.

Contextually, hooks often approached spirituality without sanctimony, using it as a tool for clarity rather than consolation. This quote is a critique of avoidance disguised as comfort: you don’t need to make peace with death so much as you need to stop practicing absence. Life becomes “unfamiliar” when you’ve been trained to leave it.