Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

307. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

333. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

336. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

338. “Angry women are always the villains.”

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “That was something of a revelation to me, that a young man could be kind.”

— Roxane Gay

348. “So you decide, for the first time in your life, that you aren’t going to be one of the good girls anymore. You decide that “good” is not an adjective that ought to be applied to a person, as it only rendered you inanimate and inhuman, like a piece of cheese or a watercolor painting. The good girl is nothing more than a myth. We long for her for the same reason we long for utopia: Neither exists.”

— Roxane Gay

349. “That’s not what I am looking for. John Louis von Neumann said, “If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.” Mathematics may well be simple, but the complexities of race and culture are often irreducible. They cannot be wholly addressed in a single essay or book or television show or movie.”

— Roxane Gay

350. “Like many writers, I lived inside of books as a child.”

— Roxane Gay