Roxane Gay Quotes

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.

A culture that treats women as objects, that gleefully supports entertainment that is more often demeaning toward women than it is not, that encourages the erosion of a woman’s autonomy and personal space, is the same culture that elects state lawmakers who work tirelessly to enact restrictive abortion legislation. Or is it that state lawmakers who work tirelessly to enact restrictive abortion legislation encourage their constituents to treat women as objects? Perhaps this is trickle-down misogyny — which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I was broken and then I broke some more, and I am not yet healed but I have started believing I will be.

I was cold, I’ve been told. I often write stories about women who are perceived as cold and resent that perception. I write these women because I know what it’s like to have so much warmth roiling beneath the skin’s surface, ready to be found. I am not cold. I wasn’t ever cold. My warmth was hidden far away from anything that could bring hurt because I knew I didn’t have the inner scaffolding to endure any more hurt in those protected places.

It started as a process of writing what I know to be true and it became a process of revelation. I was able to make some realisations about myself that previously I hadn’t made and it really forced me to confront my relationship not only with my body, but with food. I mostly saw how unkind I had been to myself when my body has actually gotten me through quite a lot in life. And recognising that, in many ways, I was holding on to the weight for the wrong reasons and the only one that was really hurting was myself.

rape was not an act between an individual and an individual, hidden in a dark room — that was what my rapist wanted me to think. Rape was and is a cultural and political act: it attempts to remove a person with agency, autonomy, and belonging from their community, to secrete them and separate them, to depoliticize their body by rendering it detachable, violable, nothing.

Change requires intent and effort. It really is that simple.

I was marked after that. Men could smell it on me, that I had lost my body, that they could avail themselves of my body, that I wouldn’t say no because I knew my no did not matter. They smelled it on me and took advantage, every chance they got.

What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?

Things often go wrong and cooking can be messy, but the act of creating something from disparate ingredients still remains satisfying. Cooking reminds me that I am capable of taking care of myself and worthy of taking care of and nourishing myself.

Doctors are supposed to first do no harm, but when it comes to fat bodies, most doctors seem fundamentally incapable of heeding their oath.

Part of the reason relationships and friendships can be so difficult for me is because there is a part of me that thinks I have to get things just right. I have to say the right things and do the right things or I won’t be liked or loved anymore.

A woman who cleaned their homes had such a naturally fine body while they stretched themselves taut with the finest surgeons in South Florida and didn't look half as good. It wasn't fair. Money was supposed to make things fair.

I often say that reading and writing saved my life. I mean that quite literally.

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.