Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Feminism, as of late, has suffered from a certain guilt by association because we conflate feminism with women who advocate feminism as part of their personal brand. When these figureheads say what we want to hear, we put them up on the Feminist Pedestal, and when they do something we don’t like, we knock them right off and then say there’s something wrong with feminism because our feminist leaders have failed us. We forget the difference between feminism and Professional Feminists.”

— Roxane Gay

102. “My mother’s favorite saying is “Qui se ressemble s’assemble.” Whenever she didn’t approve of who I was spending time with, she’d say this ominously. It means, essentially, you are whom you surround yourself with.”

— Roxane Gay

103. “It’s okay if most of your friends are guys, but if you champion this as a commentary on the nature of female friendships, soul search a little.”

— Roxane Gay

104. “Buying into the notion of not that bad made me incredibly hard on myself for not “getting over it” fast enough as the years passed and I was still carrying so much hurt, so many memories. Buying into this notion made me numb to bad experiences that weren’t as bad as the worst stories I heard. For years, I fostered wildly unrealistic expectations of the kinds of experiences worthy of suffering until very little was worthy of suffering. The surfaces of my empathy became calloused.”

— Roxane Gay

105. “What I know and what I feel are two very different things.”

— Roxane Gay

106. “Feminism’s failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come.”

— Roxane Gay

107. “This is to say, I know what it means to hunger without being hungry.”

— Roxane Gay

108. “Smoking felt good and always gave me a light buzz. Smoking also made me feel cool when I knew I was very, very uncool.”

— Roxane Gay

109. “I am mortified by my music choices.”

— Roxane Gay

110. “I am thinking about testimony I’ve heard from other women over the years – women sharing their truths, daring to use their voices to say, “This is what happened to me. This is how I have been wronged.” I’ve been thinking about how so much testimony is demanded of women, and still, there are those who doubt our stories.”

— Roxane Gay

111. “I want characters to do the things I am afraid to do for fear of making myself more unlikable than I may already be. I want characters to be the most honest of all things – human.”

— Roxane Gay

112. “I was cold, I’ve been told. I often write stories about women who are perceived as cold and resent that perception. I write these women because I know what it’s like to have so much warmth roiling beneath the skin’s surface, ready to be found. I am not cold. I wasn’t ever cold. My warmth was hidden far away from anything that could bring hurt because I knew I didn’t have the inner scaffolding to endure any more hurt in those protected places.”

— Roxane Gay

113. “I was marked after that. Men could smell it on me, that I had lost my body, that they could avail themselves of my body, that I wouldn’t say no because I knew my no did not matter. They smelled it on me and took advantage, every chance they got.”

— Roxane Gay

114. “Once upon a time, my life was a fairy tale and then I was stolen from everything I’ve ever loved. There was no happily ever after. After days of dying, I was dead.”

— Roxane Gay

115. “What may be most terrifying is just how real reality television is, after all. We say we watch these shows to feel better about ourselves, to have that reassurance that we are not that desperate. We are not that green. But perhaps we watch these shows because in the green girls interrupted, we see more than anything, the plainest selections of ourselves, garishly exposed but unfettered.”

— Roxane Gay

116. “There’s a lot to love about breaking things. Everyone.”

— Roxane Gay

117. “Why do we view the boundaries people create for themselves as challenges? Why do we see someone setting a limit and then try to push?”

— Roxane Gay

118. “Writing has always allowed me to escape. I was a very lonely child. Because I was very socially awkward, I would always have trouble making friends. And so reading and writing allowed me to have friends and to have an active imaginary life that really sort of kept me sane.”

— Roxane Gay

119. “The medical community is not particularly interested in taking the pain of women seriously.”

— Roxane Gay

120. “I am weary of all our sad stories – not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, that there are so many.”

— Roxane Gay

121. “Many comedians are very proud of themselves for saying the things others are supposedly afraid to say. They are at the forefront of this culture of entitlement where we get to do anything, think anything, and say anything.”

— Roxane Gay

122. “During my twenties, my personal life was the hottest mess. The hottest. It will never be that messy again because I’ve grown up and I finally give enough of a damn about myself to avoid burning myself in that kind of fire. I’m still a mess, but I’m a different kind of mess now. I can generally identify what the mess is and where it’s coming from.”

— Roxane Gay

123. “What I resent in 12 Years a Slave is how the suffering of women is used to further a man’s narrative.”

— Roxane Gay

124. “The story of my life is wanting, hungering, for what I cannot have or, perhaps, wanting what I dare not allow myself to have.”

— Roxane Gay

125. “There are times when I wish finding community was as simple as entering some personal information and letting an algorithm show me where I belong. And then I realize that in many ways, this is what the Internet and social networking has done for me – offered community.”

— Roxane Gay

126. “Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses – pretty but designed to SLOW women down.”

— Roxane Gay

127. “What this debate shows us is that even in this day and age, the rights of women are not inalienable. Our rights can be and are, with alarming regularity, stripped away. I struggle to accept that my body is a legislative matter. The truth of this fact makes it difficult for me to breathe. I don’t feel like I have inalienable rights. I don’t feel free. I don’t feel like my body is my own.”

— Roxane Gay

128. “Fat daughters and their thin mothers have especially complicated relationships.”

— Roxane Gay

129. “The ways we are taught to be a girl start when you are very young. When you are being taught, you don’t know about the points. When you are being taught to be a girl, the lessons are simply accepted-the price you pay for your curves, your holes. It’s only later, when you are older, after you’ve been taught, that you find out about the score sheet.”

— Roxane Gay

130. “And still, when I am with my family, when we become that island unto ourselves, I allow myself to be a part of them. I am trying to forgive and make up for lost time, to close the distances I put between us even though it was necessary, for a time, for me to be apart from them. These are the people who know not all of me but know enough, know what matters most. They continue to love me so hard and I love them hard in return.”

— Roxane Gay

131. “Sometimes people tell me that something bad happened to me, but I am brave and strong. I don’t want to be told that I am brave or strong. I am not right just because he was wrong. I don’t want to be made noble. I want someone willing to watch me thrash and crumple because that, too, is the truth, and it needs a witness. “He broke me,” I say to a friend. “You’re not broken,” she whispers back. I turn my palms up, wishing I could show her the pieces.”

— Roxane Gay

132. “I step away as I notice a group of young, angry men walking toward us. I doubt that there is any particular reason for their anger. It is the anger that most men feel these days; they are angry about their impotence and their desires and their reality. It is an anger we all feel. But it is an anger only men can freely express.”

— Roxane Gay

133. “Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human, to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.”

— Roxane Gay

134. “Girls have been written and represented in popular culture in many different ways. Most of these representations have been largely unsatisfying because they never get girlhood quite right. It is not possible for girlhood to be represented wholly – girlhood is too vast and too individual an experience. We can only try to represent girlhood in ways that are varied and recognizable. All too often, however, this doesn’t happen.”

— Roxane Gay

135. “An angry man in cinema is Batman. An angry male musician is a member of Metallica. An angry male writer is Chekhov. An angry male politician is passionate, a revolutionary. He is a Donald Trump or a Bernie Sanders. The anger of men is a powerful enough tide to swing an election. But the anger of women? That has no place in government, so it has to flood the streets.”

— Roxane Gay

136. “These are gifted adolescent women who don’t get to be judged on their impressive talent: their bodies are already paramount to the work they want to do and it’s only going to get worse. At sixteen these students are being judged on their sexual attractiveness. Their talent is a gift, but it is not enough.”

— Roxane Gay

137. “I want to look good. I want to feel good. I want to be beautiful in this body I am in.”

— Roxane Gay

138. “The thing about shame is that there are depths. I have no idea where the bottom of my shame resides.”

— Roxane Gay

139. “It took you twelve years to see that being “good” had gotten your piano teacher everywhere and you nowhere at all. So you decide, for the first time in your life, that you aren’t going to be one of the good girls anymore. You decide that “good” is not an adjective that ought to be applied to a person, as it only rendered you inanimate and inhuman, like a piece of cheese or a watercolor painting.”

— Roxane Gay

140. “I am always holding on to the hope of tomorrow.”

— Roxane Gay

141. “Few are willing to consider the possibility that trigger warnings might be ineffective, impractical, and necessary for creating safe spaces all at once.”

— Roxane Gay

142. “Sherman Alexie wrote, “There are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books – especially the dark and dangerous ones – will save them.”

— Roxane Gay

143. “If women’s fortunes improve, it must mean men’s fortunes will suffer, as if there is a finite amount of good fortune in the universe that cannot be shared equally between men and women.”

— Roxane Gay

144. “Mona is my best friend. Wherever she has gone, the whole of our lives, I have tried to follow. Michael and I moved to Miami because she was there. Wherever she is feels more like home.”

— Roxane Gay

145. “A different day has come, though. I flinch less and less when I am touched. I don’t always see gentleness as the calm before the storm because, more often than not, I can trust that no storm is coming. I harbor less hatred toward myself. I try to forgive myself for my trespasses.”

— Roxane Gay

146. “What goes unsaid is that women might be more ambitious and focused because we’ve never had a choice. We’ve had to fight to vote, to work outside the home, to work in environments free of sexual harassment, to attend the universities of our choice, and we’ve also had to prove ourselves over and over to receive any modicum of consideration.”

— Roxane Gay

147. “It is not possible for girlhood to be represented wholly – girlhood is too vast and too individual an experience.”

— Roxane Gay

148. “Death is a tragedy whether it is the death of one girl-woman in London or seventy-seven men, women, and children in Norway. We know this, but perhaps it needs to be said over and over again so we do not forget. I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.”

— Roxane Gay

149. “Just write and love what you’re writing. And if you’re not loving what you’re writing, take a look at why and fix that.”

— Roxane Gay

150. “As Syreeta McFadden noted, “Only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder.”

— Roxane Gay