Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

218. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

226. “As individuals, we may not be able to do much, but when we’re silent when someone uses the word “gay” as an insult, we are falling short. When we don’t vote to support equal marriage rights for all, we are falling short. When we support musicians like Tyler, the Creator, we are falling short. We are failing our communities. We are failing civil rights. There are injustices great and small, and even if we can only fight the small ones, at least we are fighting.”

— Roxane Gay

227. “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

228. “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

229. “I didn’t say anything on social media, though relatives tried to tag me in supportive status updates, which I did my best to untag myself from. I didn’t want to be a part of their mourning. I didn’t want to be involved in someone else’s grief when I knew so little about how to deal with my own.”

— Roxane Gay

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “I get my first paycheck. We are paid once a month, which requires the kind of budgeting I am incapable of. Life is unpleasant after the twenty-third or so. I’ve been a graduate student for so long it’s hard to fathom that one check can have four numbers and change. Then I see how much The Man takes. Damn The Man.”

— Roxane Gay

238. “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

239. “Because I read so much, I was a romantic in my heart of hearts, but my desire to be part of a romantic story was a very intellectual, detached one. I liked the idea of a boy asking me out, taking me on a date, kissing me, but I did not want to actually be alone with a boy, because a boy could hurt me.”

— Roxane Gay

240. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

242. “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, an.”

— Roxane Gay

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

247. “I appreciate that at least some of who I am rises out of the worst day of my life and I don’t want to change who I am.”

— Roxane Gay

248. “Movies, more often than not, tell the stories of men as if men’s stories are the only stories that matter. When women are involved, they are sidekicks, the romantic interests, the afterthoughts. Rarely do women get to be the center of attention. Rarely do our stories get to matter.”

— Roxane Gay

249. “So often feminism is built up as this thing where you have to be perfect. You have to be consistent and you can’t ever deviate. That’s just not realistic.”

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay