Roxane Gay Quotes

When I am walking down the street, men lean out of their car windows and shout vulgar things at me about my body, how they see it, and how it upsets them that I am not catering to their gaze and their preferences and desires. I try not to take these men seriously because what they are really saying is, “I am not attracted to you. I do not want to fuck you, and this confuses my understanding of my masculinity, entitlement, and place in this world.” It is not my job to please them with my body.

In the self-defense class, our teacher taught us that if we couldn't imagine doing something- cracking an assailant in the head with a stapler, opening up a can of pepper spray on an attacker, digging our keys into the eyes of a would-be rapist- we wouldn't be able to act in a real crisis. Wielding the stapler, the pepper spray, and the keys, our teacher taught us the power of visualization, and I learned to imagine in advance what I might be called upon to do in an emergency... I have my keys in my hand and I am holding them like a claw. Let's turn this motherfucking system around.

Every day, I try to make the best decisions possible about what I create, what I consume, and who I collaborate with - but living in the world, participating in capitalism, requires moral compromise. I am not looking for purity; it doesn't exist. Instead, I'm trying to do the best I can, and take a stand when I think I can have an impact.

It's not that I don't want to love unharmed people; I just don't understand them.

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

If people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.

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

There is a before and an after…In the after I was broken, shattered, and silent.

He has told me, “I am only telling you what no one else will,” but of course, he is telling me what the world is always telling me, everywhere I go.

We were young once and then we weren’t.

Do my boundaries exist if I don’t voice them?

What goes unsaid is that women might be more ambitious and focused because we’ve never had a choice. We’ve had to fight to vote, to work outside the home, to work in environments free of sexual harassment, to attend the universities of our choice, and we’ve also had to prove ourselves over and over to receive any modicum of consideration.

This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided.

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.

No matter what issues I have with feminism, I am a feminist. I cannot and will not deny the importance and absolute necessity of feminism. Like most people, I’m full of contradictions, but I also don’t want to be treated like shit for being a woman.