Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Everything I know about my family’s history, I know in fragments. We are the keepers of secrets. We are secrets ourselves. We try to protect each other from the geography of so much sorrow. I don’t know that we succeed.”

— Roxane Gay

203. “He has told me, “I am only telling you what no one else will,” but of course, he is telling me what the world is always telling me, everywhere I go.”

— Roxane Gay

204. “You are your body, nothing more, and your body should damn well become less.”

— Roxane Gay

205. “One of the many things I have always loved about writing, not to be confused with publishing, is that all you need is your imagination. It doesn’t matter who you are, you can write. Your looks, especially, don’t matter.”

— Roxane Gay

206. “It’s not that I don’t want to love unharmed people; I just don’t understand them.”

— Roxane Gay

207. “I am determined to be more than my body – what my body has endured, what my body has become. Determination, though, has not gotten me very far.”

— Roxane Gay

208. “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

209. “I was a shy girl, but when I read, I was adventurous. Books made me bolder.”

— Roxane Gay

210. “For a moment, Milly couldn’t breathe as her anger flew out of her chest and into her mouth. She ran her tongue over it, hard and bitter, then swallowed it again.”

— Roxane Gay

211. “I’m not sure how we can get better at having these conversations, but I do know we need to overcome our deeply entrenched positions and resistance to nuance. We have to be more interested in making things better than just being right, or interesting, or funny.”

— Roxane Gay

212. “My mother has often told me there are some things you cannot tell a man who loves you, things he cannot handle knowing.”

— Roxane Gay

213. “A woman should always have the right to choose what she does with her body. It is frustrating that this needs to be said, repeatedly.”

— Roxane Gay

214. “Here I am showing you the ferocity of my hunger. Here I am, finally freeing myself to be vulnerable and terribly human. Here I am, reveling in that freedom. Here. See what I hunger for and what my truth has allowed me to create.”

— Roxane Gay

215. “I’ve been that girl, too big for the clothes in the store, just trying to find something, anything, that fits, while also dealing with the commentary of someone else who means well but can’t help but make pointed, insensitive comments. To be that girl in a clothing store is to be the loneliest girl in the world. I.”

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

217. “Sometimes we try to convince ourselves of things that are not true, reframing the past to better explain the present.”

— Roxane Gay

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed.”

— Roxane Gay

222. “I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. She is still small and scared and ashamed, and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear.”

— Roxane Gay

223. “The idea of a secret that will be revealed always results in one of two scenarios: death and destruction, or self-discovery and recovery beyond our wildest dreams of unification. And in the greatest of sagas, both at the same time.”

— Roxane Gay

224. “When did men become the measure? When did we collectively decide writing was more worthy if men embraced it? I suppose it was the “literary establishment” that made this decision when, for too long, men dominated the canon, and it was men whose work was elevated as worthy, who received the majority of the prestigious literary prizes and critical attention.”

— Roxane Gay

225. “The thing is, I am not at all sure that feminism has ever suggested women can have it all. This notion of being able to have it all is always misattributed to feminism when really, it’s human nature to want it all – to have cake and eat it too without necessarily focusing on how we can get there and how we can make “having it all” possible for a wider range of people and not just the lucky ones.”

— Roxane Gay

226. “We have to be more interested in making things better than just being right, or interesting, or funny.”

— Roxane Gay

227. “The constant drumbeat of stories of sexual assault – from R. Kelly to our own goddamn president – keep me in a constant state of postrape PTSD. Some days, I feel like I have to hold my breath just to read the news so I can get through it and on with my workday.”

— Roxane Gay

228. “When we’re talking about race or religion or politics, it is often said we need to speak carefully. These are difficult topics where we need to be vigilant not only in what we say but also in how we express ourselves. That same care must extend to how we write about violence and sexual violence in particular.”

— Roxane Gay

229. “I am confident in my opinions and believe I have a right to share my point of view without apology. This confidence tends to upset people who disagree with me. Rarely are my actual ideas engaged. Instead, my weight is discussed. “You are fat,” they say.”

— Roxane Gay

230. “I deny myself gentler kinds of affection – to touch or be kindly touched – as if that is a pleasure a body like mine does not deserve.”

— Roxane Gay

231. “These reactions hurt, for so many reasons. They illustrate how little people think of fat people, how they assume we are neither smart nor capable if we have such unruly bodies.”

— Roxane Gay

232. “We have these shames we keep to ourselves because to show ourselves as we are, no more and no less, would be too much. Shame.”

— Roxane Gay

233. “I often say that reading and writing saved my life. I mean that quite literally.”

— Roxane Gay

234. “I am quite content to be in my thirties, and nothing affirms that more than being around people in their late teens and early twenties.”

— Roxane Gay

235. “I no longer want to believe these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them.”

— Roxane Gay

236. “I wish I did not see my body as something for which I should apologize or provide explanation.”

— Roxane Gay

237. “In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. For whatever reason, we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.”

— Roxane Gay

238. “I do not suffer from ignorance where exercise is related. I suffer from inertia.”

— Roxane Gay

239. “I am an acquired taste.”

— Roxane Gay

240. “You are the best of our people, but you are not yet good enough.”

— Roxane Gay

241. “I reserve my most elaborate delusions and disappointments for myself.”

— Roxane Gay

242. “Intellectually, I do not equate thinness with happiness. I could wake up thin tomorrow and I would still carry the same baggage I have been hauling around for almost thirty years. I would still bear the scar tissue of many of those years as a fat person in a cruel world.”

— Roxane Gay

243. “Feminism is flawed, but it offers, at its best, a way to navigate this shifting cultural climate. Feminism has certainly helped me find my voice. Feminism has helped me believe my voice matters, even in this world where there are so many voices demanding to be heard. How do we reconcile the imperfections of feminism with all the good it can do? In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. For.”

— Roxane Gay

244. “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.”

— Roxane Gay

245. “We must stop pointing to the exceptions – these bright shining stars who transcend circumstance. We must look to how we can best support the least among us, not spend all our time blindly revering and trying to mimic the greatest without demanding systemic change.”

— Roxane Gay

246. “I am self-conscious beyond measure. I am intensely and constantly preoccupied with my body in the world because I know what people think and what they see when they look at me. I know that I am breaking the unspoken rules of what a woman should look like. I.”

— Roxane Gay

247. “Everything was out of my control and I love control, so all my trigger points were being pressed at the exact same time.”

— Roxane Gay

248. “It had never crossed my mind before that it was possible for a child to be educated in this country and make it to college unable to read at a college level. Shame on me, certainly, for being so ignorant about the galling disparities in how children are educated. Shame on me.”

— Roxane Gay

249. “I deny myself certain trappings of femininity as if i do not have the right to such expression when my body does not follow society’s dictates for what a woman’s body should look like.”

— Roxane Gay

250. “I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I’m writing.”

— Roxane Gay