Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am a bad feminist and a good woman. I am trying to become better in how I think and say and do – without abandoning what makes me human.”

— Roxane Gay

2. “Violence is not the answer but neither is peace.”

— Roxane Gay

3. “Qui tacet consentire videtur is Latin for “Silence gives consent.” When we say nothing, when we do nothing, we are consenting to these trespasses against us.”

— Roxane Gay

4. “The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.”

— Roxane Gay

5. “When you can’t find someone to follow, you have to find a way to lead by example.”

— Roxane Gay

6. “I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.”

— Roxane Gay

7. “Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.”

— Roxane Gay

8. “I believe feminism is grounded in supporting the choices of women even if we wouldn’t make certain choices for ourselves.”

— Roxane Gay

9. “Change requires intent and effort. It really is that simple.”

— Roxane Gay

10. “Books are often far more than just books.”

— Roxane Gay

11. “All too often, when we see injustices, both great and small, we think, That’s terrible, but we do nothing. We say nothing. We let other people fight their own battles. We remain silent because silence is easier. Qui tacet consentire videtur is Latin for ‘Silence gives consent.’ When we say nothing, when we do nothing, we are consenting to these trespasses against us.”

— Roxane Gay

12. “With my writing, I generally just pretend that no one’s reading it. I allow myself that delusion so that I can write the things that I write.”

— Roxane Gay

13. “We all have history. You can think you’re over your history. You can think the past is the past. And then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. The past is always with you.”

— Roxane Gay

14. “So many of us are reaching out, hoping someone out there will grab our hands and remind us we are not as alone as we fear.”

— Roxane Gay

15. “As a woman, as a fat woman, I am not supposed to take up space. And yet, as a feminist, I am encouraged to believe I can take up space. I live in a contradictory space where I should try to take up space but not too much of it, and not in the wrong way, where the wrong way is any way where my body is concerned.”

— Roxane Gay

16. “I live in the middle of nowhere and I’m an insomniac. I just make the time and I read and write really fast so that makes a lot possible for me. I wish I had an explanation for it. I’m grateful for it.”

— Roxane Gay

17. “If people cannot be flawed in fiction there’s no place left for us to be human.”

— Roxane Gay

18. “Somewhere along the line we started misinterpreting the First Amendment and this idea of the freedom of speech the amendment grants us. We are free to speak as we choose without fear of prosecution or persecution, but we are not free to speak as we choose without consequence.”

— Roxane Gay

19. “To be clear, the fat acceptance movement is important, affirming, and profoundly necessary, but I also believe that part of fat acceptance is accepting that some of us struggle with body image and haven’t reached a place of peace and unconditional self-acceptance.”

— Roxane Gay

20. “Twitter is my happy place. I am not there to overthink 140 characters.”

— Roxane Gay

21. “What a privilege it is to be able to say it’s hard to hear someone’s story.”

— Roxane Gay

22. “We should be able to say, “This is my truth,” and have that truth stand without a hundred clamoring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot coexist. Because at some point, doesn’t privilege become beside the point?”

— Roxane Gay

23. “I was broken and then I broke some more, and I am not yet healed but I have started believing I will be.”

— Roxane Gay

24. “I lost my voice, but I had words.”

— Roxane Gay

25. “I am stronger than I am broken.”

— Roxane Gay

26. “I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.”

— Roxane Gay

27. “On bad days, though, I forget how to separate my personality, the heart of who I am, from my body. I forget how to shield myself from the cruelties of the world.”

— Roxane Gay

28. “I found ways to hide in plain sight, to keep feeding a hunger that could never be satisfied – the hunger to stop hurting.”

— Roxane Gay

29. “People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things.”

— Roxane Gay

30. “There is no pleasure to be had in writing about trauma. It requires opening a wound, looking into the bloody gape of it, and cleaning it out, one word at a time. Only then might it be possible for that wound to heal.”

— Roxane Gay

31. “I wrote about my trauma because it was the only thing I could do. I did not yet know how to make myself be heard.”

— Roxane Gay

32. “We were young once and then we weren’t.”

— Roxane Gay

33. “In our culture, we talk a lot about change and growing up, but man, we don’t talk nearly enough about how difficult it is.”

— Roxane Gay

34. “Feminism is a choice, and if a woman does not want to be a feminist, that is her right, but it is still my responsibility to fight for her rights.”

— Roxane Gay

35. “You don’t necessarily have to do anything once you acknowledge your privilege. You don’t have to apologize for it. You need to understand the extent of your privilege, the consequences of your privilege, and remain aware that people who are different from you move through and experience.”

— Roxane Gay

36. “The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.”

— Roxane Gay

37. “The women of reality television are, perhaps, the greenest of girls, women who revel in watching themselves suffer because they have been so irrevocably interrupted they do not know what else they should do.”

— Roxane Gay

38. “Unlikable women refuse to give in to that temptation. They are, instead, themselves. They accept the consequences of their choices, and those consequences become stories worth reading.”

— Roxane Gay

39. “In a perfect world, pregnancy would be an intimate experience shared by a woman and her partner alone, but for various reasons that is not possible. Pregnancy is an experience that invites public intervention and forces the female body into the public discourse. In many ways, pregnancy is the least private experience of a woman’s life.”

— Roxane Gay

40. “My body is a cage. My body is a cage of my own making. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years.”

— Roxane Gay

41. “This body is resilient. It can endure all kinds of things. My body offers me the power of presence. My body is powerful.”

— Roxane Gay

42. “This is the reality of living in my body: I am trapped in a cage. The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far. It.”

— Roxane Gay

43. “My brother once called me a hard person. I think he meant that I am a person who does not forgive. This is true. I find it difficult to forgive people who have done harm to me.”

— Roxane Gay

44. “We were young once.”

— Roxane Gay

45. “What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?”

— Roxane Gay

46. “We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgment rather than accusation. We need to be able to argue beyond the threat of privilege. We need to stop playing Privilege or Oppression Olympics because we’ll never get anywhere until we find more effective ways.”

— Roxane Gay

47. “You have to be consistent. You have to be yourself. You have to be committed to what you’re doing. You have to not be afraid to be ambitious.”

— Roxane Gay

48. “Just because you survive something does not mean you are strong.”

— Roxane Gay

49. “Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.”

— Roxane Gay

50. “The bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.”

— Roxane Gay