Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “There is a plague on grandmothers. The elder relations of my students begin passing away at an alarming rate one week. I want to warn the surviving grandmothers, somehow. I want them to live.”

— Roxane Gay

303. “Honey, you’re not crazy. You’re a woman.”

— Roxane Gay

304. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

306. “Feminism is a choice, and if a woman does not want to be a feminist, that is her right, but it is still my responsibility to fight for her rights. I believe feminism is grounded in supporting the choices of women even if we wouldn’t make certain choices for ourselves. I believe women not just in the United States but throughout the world deserve equality and freedom but know I am in no position to tell women of other cultures what that equality and freedom should look like.”

— Roxane Gay

307. “The ways in which I am my mother’s daughter are infinite.”

— Roxane Gay

308. “I don’t save lives, but I try not to ruin them.”

— Roxane Gay

309. “There is no way to truly know whom we need to protect ourselves from.”

— Roxane Gay

310. “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

311. “What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.”

— Roxane Gay

312. “Every time I watch a yogurt commercial I think, my god, I want to be that happy. I really do.”

— Roxane Gay

313. “I have no idea how I got to be the one at the front of the classroom, the one who gets to be in charge of things. Most of the time, I feel like the kid who gets to sit at the adult table for the first time at Thanksgiving. I’m not sure which fork to use. My feet can’t reach the floor.”

— Roxane Gay

314. “It seems that, if something makes you feel better, it is a healthy option. Want to sleep all day? That’s okay. Drink too much? That can be a valid coping choice. Isolating yourself via a fear of the outside world? Self-preservation is important.”

— Roxane Gay

315. “No one gets to rake over the details of my life and determine if they think what happened to me was bad enough for me to have earned my scars, my limitations, my superpowers.”

— Roxane Gay

316. “I am not the same scared girl that I was. I have let the right ones in.”

— Roxane Gay

317. “On the scale of relevance, public approval or disapproval of a woman’s choices should not merit measure.”

— Roxane Gay

318. “If you are reading this essay, you have some kind of privilege. It may be hard to hear that, I know, but if you cannot recognize your privilege, you have a lot of work to do; get started.”

— Roxane Gay

319. “My body is a cage, but this is my cage and there are moments where I take pride in it.”

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

321. “Twitter has allowed the conversation to broaden and become more inclusive. At times, the conversation is really tense but that’s because we’re talking about really important issues. It’s not going to be easy but at least the conversations are happening.”

— Roxane Gay

322. “I wanted a relationship where I could be independent but loved and looked after at the same time.”

— Roxane Gay

323. “Even from a young age I understood that when a girl is unlikable, a girl is a problem.”

— Roxane Gay

324. “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

325. “We don’t necessarily know how to hear stories about any kind of violence, because it is hard to accept that violence is as simple as it is complicated, that you can love someone who hurts you, that you can stay with someone who hurts you, that you can be hurt by someone who loves you, that you can be hurt by a complete stranger, that you can be hurt in so many terrible, intimate ways.”

— Roxane Gay

326. “Summary If a boy treats you like you’re special, it’s probably because he wants to come and not because you are a treasure he discovered. You are not a treasure. You are a thing a boy can use to make him ejaculate. This makes sense because you already believe this at your core. You have been taught.”

— Roxane Gay

327. “I’m undestroying myself after years of allowing myself to stay damaged.”

— Roxane Gay

328. “As a naturally shy person, I loved the anonymity of writing before my career took off. I loved how my stories didn’t care about my weight. When I started publishing that writing, I loved that, to my readers, what mattered were the words on the page. Through writing, I was, finally, able to gain respect for the content of my character.”

— Roxane Gay

329. “I realized that when writing about trauma, you have to be prepared to handle not only your own trauma but being exposed to the trauma of others.”

— Roxane Gay

330. “They require a diagnosis for her unlikability in order to tolerate her. The simplest explanation, of Mavis as human, will not suffice.”

— Roxane Gay

331. “At sixty minutes, I calmly stopped pedaling, peeled my shirt away from my skin, wiped the bike down, and slowly exited the room.”

— Roxane Gay

332. “But I would fall asleep next to someone who loved me, and would never leave me alone with old ghosts.”

— Roxane Gay

333. “Angry women are always the villains.”

— Roxane Gay

334. “My heart received even less consideration than my body, so I tried to lock it away but never quite succeeded.”

— Roxane Gay

335. “People in town didn’t understand Anna and largely believed her to be godless, a designation she rather enjoyed because she understood that in their community, to be godless was to have a mind of one’s own.”

— Roxane Gay

336. “We tend to believe that accusations of privilege imply we have it easy, which we resent because life is hard for nearly everyone.”

— Roxane Gay

337. “When you look past the image, a celebrity is merely a person you know nothing about.”

— Roxane Gay

338. “She was a mess. So what? We are all stinking messes, every last one of us, or we once were messes and found our way out, or we are trying to find our way out of a mess, scratching, reaching.”

— Roxane Gay

339. “The majority of people who are stopped and frisked in New York are black or Latino because these demographics fit our cultural profile of danger. These are the supposed barbarians at the gate, not the boy with the “soulful brown eyes.”

— Roxane Gay

340. “To change the world, we need to face what has become of it. To heal from a trauma, we need to understand the extent of it.”

— Roxane Gay

341. “She grabbed me and pulled me into a warm embrace. Just as quickly she pushed me away. She said, “Thank you for getting on my nerves for so long,” and I said, “You’re welcome, Lorraine.” We have talked three or four times a week ever since. She is family.”

— Roxane Gay

342. “I was always a good girl. I was a straight-A student, top of my class. I did as I was told. I was polite to my elders. I was good to my siblings. I went to church. It was very easy to hide how very bad I was becoming from my family, from everyone. Being good is the best way to be bad.”

— Roxane Gay

343. “One of my favorite moments is when a guy, at that certain point in a relationship, says something desperately hopeful like, ‘Are you on the pill?’ I simply say, ‘No, are you?”

— Roxane Gay

344. “I am determined to be more than my body – what my body has endured, what my body has become.”

— Roxane Gay

345. “Any number of celebrities are dogged by “gay rumors” because we cannot quite place them into a given category. We act like placing these people in categories will have some impact on our lives, or that creating these categories is our responsibility, when, most of the time, such taxonomy won’t change anything at all.”

— Roxane Gay

346. “You are willing to be abused for the mirage of fame in the desert of your life.”

— Roxane Gay

347. “For many, many years to come, I would keep telling myself that the barest minimum of acknowledgment from lovers was enough.”

— Roxane Gay

348. “On my more difficult days, I’m not sure what’s more of a pain in my ass – being black or being a woman. I’m happy to be both of these things, but the world keeps intervening.”

— Roxane Gay

349. “I made my choice. There is nothing you cannot do when you are no one.”

— Roxane Gay

350. “The waters did not run deep. It was just a border between two geographies of grief.”

— Roxane Gay