Top 380 Roxane Gay Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “That was something of a revelation to me, that a young man could be kind.”

— Roxane Gay

352. “It is far more important to discuss power than to exhaustively regurgitate the harmful cultural effects of power structures where women are consistently marginalized. We already know the effects. We live them and try to overcome them.”

— Roxane Gay

353. “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

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

— Roxane Gay

355. “It’s scary believing that you, as you are, could ever be enough.”

— Roxane Gay

356. “There’s certainly a portion of my brain that is always tuned to making wry observations about the world, but that portion of my brain was alive and well before Twitter.”

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

360. “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

361. “Reading remains one of the purest things I do.”

— Roxane Gay

362. “People love a real tragedy when they think it cannot happen to them.”

— Roxane Gay

363. “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

364. “When I read, I could forget.”

— Roxane Gay

365. “The moment we see a pop artifact offering even a sliver of something different – say, a woman who isn’t a size zero or who doesn’t treat a man as the center of the universe – we cling to it desperately because that representation is all we have.”

— Roxane Gay

366. “I am as healed as I am ever going to be. I have accepted that I will never be the girl I could have been if, if, if.”

— Roxane Gay

367. “But “am” doesn’t seem right either. To “be” a body suggests that you are only a body. You are meat and some blood. You are hard bones and flexing cartilage. You are tangled veins and skin. Is that all, though?”

— Roxane Gay

368. “I felt so utterly alone and because I no longer need the layers of protection I built around myself but pulling those layers back is harder than I could have ever imagined.”

— Roxane Gay

369. “There is a video of the attack too because this is the future. The unspeakable will be televised.”

— Roxane Gay

370. “This is the memoir of my body. My body was broken. I was broken. I did not know how to put myself back together. I was splintered. A part of me was dead. A part of me was mute and would stay that way for many years.”

— Roxane Gay

371. “He was so kind to me and never wanted anything from me but friendship. That was something of a revelation to me, that a young man could be kind.”

— Roxane Gay

372. “Do my boundaries exist if I don’t voice them?”

— Roxane Gay

373. “It is hard to write about happy things when you can never escape the kind of cold that sinks into your bones and stays there. I am in Siberia, I decide. I am comforted by thoughts of exile, cold solace, meditation, and inspiration born of emotional deprivation. It is all very dramatic.”

— Roxane Gay

374. “Many unlicensed women took to other women because they had no need to put up with men. Seraphina envied them that, too.”

— Roxane Gay

375. “I pretended to be anyone but myself, hoping I could lose myself in the virtual world. I wanted to lose myself because I was losing my mind.”

— Roxane Gay

376. “Often in literary criticism, writers are told that a character isn’t likable, as if a character’s likability is directly proportional to the quality of a novel’s writing.”

— Roxane Gay

377. “Because I have so many deeply held opinions about gender equality, I feel a lot of pressure to live up to certain ideals. I am supposed to be a good feminist who is having it all, doing it all. Really, though, I’m a woman in her thirties struggling to accept herself and her credit score. For so long I told myself I was not this woman – utterly human and flawed. I worked overtime to be anything but this woman, and it was exhausting and unsustainable and even harder than simply embracing who I am.”

— Roxane Gay

378. “Sometimes suffering becomes more bearable when you can share the whole truth of it.”

— Roxane Gay

379. “One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. I’ve struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I’m weird, because I live in my head. When I was young, we moved around a lot, so there was rarely any time to get to know a new place, let alone new people. Loneliness was the one familiar thing, making me this bottomless pit of need, open and gaping and desperate for anything to fill me up.”

— Roxane Gay

380. “I took it for granted that this is what all families did – come together and become an island unto themselves, the kitchen table the sun around which we revolved.”

— Roxane Gay

381. “Words cannot fill the faithless with faith.”

— Roxane Gay

382. “It is your privilege that shapes what you get to worry about and it is a lack of privilege that shapes what she must worry about.”

— Roxane Gay

383. “We need to end the system where it is only white men who decide when a woman – in any position, “privileged” or not – is deserving of power and agency.”

— Roxane Gay

384. “Because in Atlas Shrugged, alpha male Francisco d’Anconia tells railroad company VP Dagny Taggart that she sounds happy in her new relationship: “’But, you see, the measure of the hell you’re able to endure is the measure of your love.”

— Roxane Gay

385. “Frequently, the person I just told would need me to be supportive while they went through a range of emotions and feelings, sometimes very intensely, and then they would usually tell me nothing would change in how they felt about me. And then things would change.”

— Roxane Gay

386. “When I am eating a meal, I have no sense of portion control. I am a completist. If the food is on my plate, I must finish it.”

— Roxane Gay

387. “Two years ago, Hanna said she was going on vacation with Laura downstate and instead drove to Marquette and had her tubes tied. She wasn’t going to end up like her mother, with too many children in a too-small house with too little to eat. Despite her best efforts, however, she has found herself living in a too-small house with too many people and too little to eat. It is a bitter pill to swallow.”

— Roxane Gay

388. “I also have to live with being the type of woman who might – or probably always will – feel guilty that she never told this man she’s trans.”

— Roxane Gay

389. “At some point, New York stopped being the city of my dreams because it stopped being merely an idea to be a part of. New York was very real and very complicated.”

— Roxane Gay

390. “Few things work in practice as well as they do in theory. Justice is anything but blind. All too often, the people who most need justice benefit the least. The statistics about who is incarcerated and how incarceration affects their future prospects are bleak.”

— Roxane Gay

391. “These are little bits of things that happened, or things you think about. They’re light on tension, you know that. There’s no real peril. There’s no resolution. Still, they stick with you. You think about them even after they’re over, sometimes for a long time. Sometimes for a very long time. That’s how you know they’re important somehow. It’s why you can recall the smell of that party, even many years after the smell of your grandfather’s cologne has faded from your memory.”

— Roxane Gay

392. “Then they will revise backward. They will take every opinion they’ve ever heard from you, every personality trait, every action, and recast them in light of what you told them.”

— Roxane Gay

393. “Already that semester, the university had been steeped in controversy after students at a freshman week welcome event had been reported chanting: “We like ’em young! Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for go to jail.”

— Roxane Gay