Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 8

251. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “I will keep writing about these intersections as a writer and a teacher, as a black woman, as a bad feminist, until I no longer feel like what I want is impossible. I no longer want to believe that these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them.”

— Roxane Gay

263. “I knew how to make sense of complicated things, as long as they had nothing to do with me.”

— Roxane Gay

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I’ve been writing since I was probably four years old – it was nonsense, but it was still my little attempts at being a storyteller.”

— Roxane Gay

268. “Disagreement, however, is not anger.”

— Roxane Gay

269. “These oldest pictures have been in the album so long that they are stuck to the pages. To try and remove the pictures would ruin them.”

— Roxane Gay

270. “What has fascinated me about cooking, and coming to it in the middle of my life, is how it’s actually a really good endeavor for a control freak. There are rules, and to succeed, at least in the early going, those rules need to be followed. I am good at following rules when I choose to.”

— Roxane Gay

271. “It was a moment when I understood that all of us have to be more considerate of the realities of the bodies of others.”

— Roxane Gay

272. “Late at night, when they lay together, as much of their bodies touching as possible, Anna and Parker had the conversations they could have only with each other. They tried to remember the before, when they were children and there was only one place to call home, one country, the flag billowing on windy days in front of homes up and down every street – bands of red and white, fifty stars, one nation, indivisible until it wasn’t, how quickly it all came apart.”

— Roxane Gay

273. “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.”

— Roxane Gay

274. “He’s the kind of man who gets ideas but is largely unable to follow through on those ideas.”

— Roxane Gay

275. “Better is not good enough, and it’s a shame that anyone would be willing to settle for so little.”

— Roxane Gay

276. “I could easily become a shut-in, hiding from the cruelty of the world. Most days it takes all my strength and no small amount of courage to get dressed and leave the house.”

— Roxane Gay

277. “A woman who cleaned their homes had such a naturally fine body while they stretched themselves taut with the finest surgeons in South Florida and didn’t look half as good. It wasn’t fair. Money was supposed to make things fair.”

— Roxane Gay

278. “I hate these shows, but clearly I watch them. I watch them even though sometimes they enrage me and sometimes they break my heart and all too often they reveal painfully familiar experiences of loneliness, depression, and genuine suffering born of living in a world that cannot accommodate overweight bodies. I watch these shows because even though I know how damaging and unrealistic they are, some part of me still yearns for the salvation they promise.”

— Roxane Gay

279. “I am not good at romantic interactions that aren’t furtive and kind of sleazy. I don’t know how to ask someone on a date. I don’t know how to gauge the potential interest of other human beings. I don’t know how to trust people who do express interest in me. I am not the girl who “gets the date” in these circumstances, or that’s what I cannot help but tell myself. I am always paralyzed by self-doubt and mistrust.”

— Roxane Gay

280. “This is what is so rarely said about unlikable women in fiction – that they aren’t pretending, that they won’t or can’t pretend to be someone they are not. They have neither the energy for it nor the desire.”

— Roxane Gay

281. “I don’t want my lover seeing only a moment from my assault when they look at me. I don’t want them to think me more fragile than I am. I am stronger than I am broken. 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

282. “I minded how they thought I expected too much from them where the definition of “too much” was to have any expectations at all.”

— Roxane Gay

283. “When I wake up, my mouth is thick and sour. I groan and sit up, and hit my head against something unfamiliar. I wince. Everything in my head feels loose, lost.”

— Roxane Gay

284. “The part I wanted them to understand is that these equations can implode, constricting your whole life, until one day you’re sitting in a locked steel box breathing through an airhole with a straw and wondering, ‘Now? Now am I safe?”

— Roxane Gay

285. “I’ve noticed while cooking, how ingredients in their individual and naked state and be a bit repulsive but necessary, kind of like people.”

— Roxane Gay

286. “I am still writing my way toward a place where I fit.”

— Roxane Gay

287. “To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance.”

— Roxane Gay

288. “The problem with movements is that, all too often, they are associated only with the most visible figures, the people with the biggest platforms and the loudest, most provocative voices.”

— Roxane Gay

289. “We were three hours from Chicago, so my blackness was less of a curiosity, more of a threat. And there were the black students on campus, the nerve of them, daring to pursue higher education. In the local newspaper, residents wrote angry letters about a new criminal element – the scourge of youthful black ambition, black joy. In my more generous moments, I tried to believe the locals were using anger to mask their fear of living in a dying town in a changing world.”

— Roxane Gay

290. “Things often go wrong and cooking can be messy, but the act of creating something from disparate ingredients still remains satisfying. Cooking reminds me that I am capable of taking care of myself and worthy of taking care of and nourishing myself.”

— Roxane Gay

291. “There are books written by women. There are books written by men. Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special “women’s fiction” designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some manner, the female experience, which, apparently, includes the topics of marriage, suburban existence, and parenthood, as if women act alone in these endeavors, wedding themselves, immaculately conceiving children, and the like.”

— Roxane Gay

292. “Living in a rural town really compelled me to start tweeting so much. Mostly, my Twitter usage is fueled by loneliness. I can go days without talking to another human being unless it’s my mother, especially when I’m not teaching or on break.”

— Roxane Gay

293. “Writers cannot protect their readers from themselves, nor should they be expected to.”

— Roxane Gay

294. “Human endurance fascinates me, probably too much because more often than not, I think of life in terms of enduring instead of living.”

— Roxane Gay

295. “There is always a moment when I am losing weight when I feel better in my body. I breathe easier. I move better. I feel myself getting smaller and stronger. My clothes fall over my body the way they should and then they start to get baggy. I get terrified. I start to worry about my body becoming more vulnerable as it grows smaller. I start to imagine all the ways I could be hurt. I start to remember all the ways I have been hurt.”

— Roxane Gay

296. “The problem with movements is that, all too often, they are associated only with the most visible figures, the people with the biggest platforms and the loudest, most provocative voices. But feminism is not whatever philosophy is being spouted by the popular media feminist flavor of the week, at least not entirely.”

— Roxane Gay

297. “Part of the reason relationships and friendships can be so difficult for me is because there is a part of me that thinks I have to get things just right. I have to say the right things and do the right things or I won’t be liked or loved anymore.”

— Roxane Gay

298. “The body is not a fortress, no matter what we may do to make it such.”

— Roxane Gay

299. “Cooking reminds me that I am capable of taking care of myself and worthy of taking care of and nourishing myself.”

— Roxane Gay

300. “Feminists are celebrating our victories and acknowledging our privilege when we have it. We’re simply refusing to settle. We’re refusing to forget how much work there is yet to be done. We’re refusing to relish the comforts we have at the expense of the women who are still seeking comfort.”

— Roxane Gay