Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “She was smart enough to want more but tired enough to accept the way things were.”

— Roxane Gay

252. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

260. “Want nothing but the best for your friends because when your friends are happy and successful, it’s probably going to be easier for you to be happy.”

— Roxane Gay

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

274. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “The older we get, the more labels and categories we collect.”

— Roxane Gay

286. “A girl is a girl whether she lives in West Omaha or Sweet Valley. Books are often far more than just books.”

— Roxane Gay

287. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

289. “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

290. “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

291. “Their God is angry and unkind because they made him in their image.”

— Roxane Gay

292. “Too often, we fail to ask ourselves what sacrifices we will make for the greater good. What stands will we take? We expect role models to model the behaviors we are perfectly capable of modeling ourselves.”

— 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. “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

296. “I was a little resentful that when a woman writes, her personal story becomes part of the story, even though the novel is fiction.”

— Roxane Gay

297. “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

298. “I no longer need the body fortress I built. I need to tear down some of the walls, and I need to tear down those walls for me and me alone, no matter what good may come of that demolition. I think of it as undestroying myself.”

— Roxane Gay

299. “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

300. “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