Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “My body is not a joke or fodder for amusement, but, I suppose, to many people, it is. My.”

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

203. “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

204. “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

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. “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

207. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

209. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

211. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

229. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

243. “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

244. “Deal with your resentment. Deal with your biases. Vigorously resist the urge to dismiss the gender problem. Make the effort and make the effort and make the effort until you no longer need to, until we don’t need to keep having this conversation. Change.”

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

246. “She was trying to disappear and she couldn’t. It is unbearable to want something so little and need it so much.”

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

248. “She was smart enough to want more but tired enough to accept the way things were.”

— Roxane Gay

249. “These kids didn’t know how to read so I got them dictionaries, and because they were too shy to discuss literacy in meetings, they would catch me walking across campus or in my office and whisper, “I need help reading.” 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

250. “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