Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “We hold all people to unspoken rules about who and how they should be, how they should think, and what they should say. We say we hate stereotypes but take issue when people deviate from those stereotypes. Men don’t cry. Feminists don’t shave their legs. Southerners are racist. Everyone is, by virtue of being human, some kind of rule breaker, and my goodness, do we hate when the rules are broken.”

— Roxane Gay

157. “I’ve been thinking about how so much testimony is demanded of women, and still, there are those who doubt our stories. There.”

— Roxane Gay

158. “I get angry when women disavow feminism and shun the feminist label but say they support all the advances born of feminism because I see a disconnect that does not need to be there. I get angry but I understand and hope someday we will live in a culture where we don’t need to distance ourselves from the feminist label, where the label doesn’t make us afraid of being alone, of being too different, of wanting too much.”

— Roxane Gay

159. “Assuming Sandberg’s advice is completely useless for working-class women is just as shortsighted as claiming her advice needs to be completely applicable to all women. And let’s be frank: if Sandberg chose to offer career advice for working-class women, a group she clearly knows little about, she would have been just as harshly criticized for overstepping her bounds.”

— Roxane Gay

160. “It’s great to remember that reading is my first love.”

— Roxane Gay

161. “Bad feminism seems like the only way I can both embrace myself as a feminist and be myself, and so I write. I chatter away on Twitter about everything that makes me angry and all the small things that bring me joy. I write blog posts about the meals I cook as I try to take better care of myself, and with each new entry, I realize that I’m undestroying myself after years of allowing myself to stay damaged.”

— Roxane Gay

162. “Black woman are rarely allowed their femininity.”

— Roxane Gay

163. “One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. I’ve struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I’m weird, because I live in my head.”

— Roxane Gay

164. “We are, after all, supposed to be one nation indivisible. Only if we act as such, might we begin to truly effect change.”

— Roxane Gay

165. “Doctors generally adhere to the Hippocratic oath, where they swear to abide by an ethical code, where they swear to act, always, in their patients’ best interests. Unless the patient is overweight. I hate going to the doctor because they seem wholly unwilling to follow the Hippocratic oath when it comes to treating obese patients. The words “first do no harm” do not apply to unruly bodies. There.”

— Roxane Gay

166. “Living in my body has expanded my empathy for other people and the truths of their bodies.”

— Roxane Gay

167. “Feminism has neglected the needs of woman of color and people of color in general. But I don’t think it means that we should overlook feminism as having nothing valuable to contribute.”

— Roxane Gay

168. “Silence is the cruelest of cruelties.”

— Roxane Gay

169. “Social networks are more than just repositories for trivial, snap judgments; they are more than merely convenient outlets for mindless joy and outrage. They offer more than the common ground and the solace we may find during culturally significant moments. Social networks also provide us with something of a flawed but necessary conscience, a constant reminder that commitment, compassion, and advocacy neither can nor ever should be finite.”

— Roxane Gay

170. “My friendships, and I use that term loosely, were fleeting and fragile and often painful, with people who generally wanted something from me and were gone as soon as they got that something. I was so lonely I was willing to tolerate these relationships. The faint resemblance of human connection was enough. It had to be enough even though it wasn’t.”

— Roxane Gay

171. “It is strange, and perhaps sad, that medical doctors came up with this terminology when they are charged with first doing no harm.”

— Roxane Gay

172. “My husband’s family is religious. His relatives believe in God. Their God is angry and unkind because they made him in their image.”

— Roxane Gay

173. “I have tried to make peace with this body. I have tried to love or at least tolerate this body in a world that displays nothing but contempt for it.”

— Roxane Gay

174. “A man has never told me he likes me. Like is more interesting than love.”

— Roxane Gay

175. “We live in a strange and terrible time for women. There are days when I think it has always been a strange and terrible time to be a woman. Womanhood feels more strange and terrible now because progress has not served women as well as it has served men.”

— Roxane Gay

176. “Anisha tells me, “A good therapist knows you have to live in the house while you remodel.”

— Roxane Gay

177. “I get so scared but the world somehow makes sense there. Being with you feels like that.”

— Roxane Gay

178. “Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don’t dare be so alive.”

— Roxane Gay

179. “It is an amazing thing,” my father once told me after Christophe was born, “how much a child loves a parent. That kind of love terrifies me.”

— Roxane Gay

180. “Reproductive freedom is a talking point. Reproductive freedom is a campaign issue. Reproductive freedom can be repealed or restricted. Reproductive freedom is not an inalienable right even though it should be.”

— Roxane Gay

181. “I’m tired of feeling like I should be grateful when popular culture deigns to acknowledge the experiences of people who are not white, middle class or wealthy, and heterosexual.”

— Roxane Gay

182. “At some point, you have to surrender to the kinds of privilege you hold.”

— Roxane Gay

183. “I don’t want them, or anyone, to think I am nothing more than the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”

— Roxane Gay

184. “People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not.”

— Roxane Gay

185. “My true loves were and still are books and writing stories and daydreaming. Sports were merely a distraction keeping me from what I really wanted to do.”

— Roxane Gay

186. “If you feel like it’s hard to be friends with women, consider that maybe women aren’t the problem. Maybe it’s just you.”

— Roxane Gay

187. “I assumed that he was going to make fun of me because I had long become accustomed to people, men mostly, calling out cruelties from their cars, their bicycles, when they walked on by – letting me know exactly what they thought of my body.”

— Roxane Gay

188. “With age comes self-awareness, or something that looks like self-awareness, and so I try to be on the lookout for patterns of behavior, choices I’m making where I’m trying too hard, giving too much, reaching too intently for being right when right is what someone else wants me to be. It’s scary, though, trying to be yourself and hoping yourself is enough. It’s scary believing that you, as you are, could never be enough.”

— Roxane Gay

189. “I remember so little from high school, but in the past few years, as my profile as a writer has gotten more visible, I’ve started to hear from the kids I went to high school with and, oddly enough, they all remember me distinctly. They reach out via e-mail, or Facebook, or at events, and ask me, eagerly, if I remember them too. They share anecdotes that make me seem like I was interesting and not as unbearable as I remember myself. I.”

— Roxane Gay

190. “As with Inglourious Basterds using World War II, Tarantino once again managed to find a traumatic cultural experience of a marginalized people that has little to do with his own history, and used that cultural experience to exercise his hubris for making farcically violent, vaguely funny movies that set to right historical wrongs from a very limited, privileged position.”

— Roxane Gay

191. “To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance, and women writers can’t fix that ignorance no matter what kind of books we write or how those books are marketed.”

— Roxane Gay

192. “Milly is not, in fact, ugly, but she might as well be. She has a pretty face, which is the same thing as ugly when a woman is fat. In the complex calculus between men and women, Milly understands that fat is always ugly and that ugly and skinny makes a woman eminently more desirable than fat and any combination such as beautiful, charming, intelligent, or kind. Milly is all those things. She knows it doesn’t matter.”

— Roxane Gay

193. “I see my tweets as a current joining a bunch of other currents in the world’s craziest ocean.”

— Roxane Gay

194. “For so long, I gave in to my self-loathing. I refused to allow myself the simple pleasure of accepting who I am and how I live and love and think and see the world. But then, I got older and I cared less about what other people think.”

— Roxane Gay

195. “I was too smart and that made people uncomfortable – most folks where we’ve lived our whole lives don’t trust too much intelligence in a woman. There is also the problem of my eyes – they don’t hide anything. If I don’t care for a person, my eyes make it plain. I don’t care for most. Folks are generally comfortable with the small lies they tell each other. They don’t know what to do with someone like me, who mostly doesn’t bother with small lies.”

— Roxane Gay

196. “Maybe I’m a bad feminist, but I am deeply committed to the issues important to the feminist movement. I have strong opinions about misogyny, institutional sexism that consistently places women at a disadvantage, the inequity in pay, the cult of beauty and thinness, the repeated attacks on reproductive freedom, violence against women, and on and on. I am as committed to fighting fiercely for equality as I am committed to disrupting the notion that there is an essential feminism.”

— Roxane Gay

197. “When your truth is so inherently questioned, it is easier to say nothing than anything at all.”

— Roxane Gay

198. “We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgment rather than accusation.”

— Roxane Gay

199. “When he finished talking, I said, “Your mother did not deserve the unwanted attentions of a man like my father.” I said, “I did not deserve the unwanted attentions of a man like you. It is often women who pay the price for what men want.”

— Roxane Gay

200. “She said, ‘There’s no mystery to keeping a man.’ She dabbed at my lipstick with a tissue she had been holding, folded, in the palm of her hand. She said, ‘You do whatever sick thing he wants, when he wants, and you’ll never have a problem.’ That was the only advice she has ever given me. She and my father divorced when I was nine.”

— Roxane Gay