Roxane Gay Quotes

My unarticulated logic went like this: if I give my body away, over and over, I can prove to myself that sex is my choice — even though, and this seems significant now, I always let the men choose me. Until I was nineteen years old, it never occurred to me that I could do the choosing. Not you, not you, not you. Yes, okay. You.

It is an amazing thing,” my father once told me after Christophe was born, “how much a child loves a parent. That kind of love terrifies me.

There’s a lot to love about breaking things.

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.

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. I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.

Feminism, as of late, has suffered from a certain guilt by association because we conflate feminism with women who advocate feminism as part of their personal brand. When these figureheads say what we want to hear, we put them up on the Feminist Pedestal, and when they do something we don't like, we knock them right off and then say there's something wrong with feminism because our feminist leaders have failed us. We forget the difference between feminism and Professional Feminists.

Sometimes we try to convince ourselves of things that are not true, reframing the past to better explain the present.

When you can’t find someone to follow, you have to find a way to lead by example.

The bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

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.

My husband's family is religious. His relatives believe in God. Their God is angry and unkind because they made him in their image.

I have tried to make peace with this body. I have tried to love or at least tolerate this body in a world that displays nothing but contempt for it.

I was too smart and that made people uncomfortable — most folks where we've lived our whole lives don't trust too much intelligence in a woman. There is also the problem of my eyes — they don't hide anything. If I don't care for a person, my eyes make it plain. I don't care for most. Folks are generally comfortable with the small lies they tell each other. They don't know what to do with someone like me, who mostly doesn't bother with small lies.

It’s great to remember that reading is my first love.

I am determined to be more than my body - what my body has endured, what my body has become.