Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “It is untenable to go through life as an exposed wound.”

— Roxane Gay

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

161. “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

162. “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

163. “When I tried to push him away, he only held on to me more tightly. I have always appreciated how he never lets me go. I need that. My natural instinct is for flight and the safety of solitude.”

— Roxane Gay

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “Silence is the cruelest of cruelties.”

— Roxane Gay

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

188. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

190. “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

191. “I am not easy to love but I am well loved. I try to love well in return.”

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

193. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

195. “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

196. “At night, Marcy worried about her ass and thighs. Her husband always said, “Baby, you are perfect,” and she flushed angrily. His assurances were so reflexive as to be insulting.”

— Roxane Gay

197. “Nemeses aren’t born. They are made.”

— Roxane Gay

198. “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

199. “My tweeting is cool and calm unless I am riled up about something and then I just surrender to the fury of my fingers.”

— Roxane Gay

200. “I was never going to be good enough, but I tried so hard. I tried to make myself better. I tried to make myself acceptable to someone who would never find me acceptable but kept me around for reasons I cannot begin to make sense of. I stayed because they confirmed every terrible thing I already knew about myself. I stayed because I thought no one else would possibly tolerate someone as worthless as me. I stayed through infidelity and disrespect. I stayed until they no longer wanted me around.”

— Roxane Gay