Roxane Gay Quotes

Don’t flirt, have sex, or engage in emotional affairs with your friends’ significant others. This shouldn’t need to be said, but it needs to be said. That significant other is an asshole, and you don’t want to be involved with an asshole who’s used goods. If you want to be with an asshole, get a fresh asshole of your very own. They are abundant.

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

feminists are “just women who don’t want to be treated like shit.

because sometimes, to find home, you must first go farther afield.

I do not suffer from ignorance where exercise is related. I suffer from inertia.

Angry women are always the villains.

I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. She is still small and scared and ashamed, and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear.

It's hard to be told to lighten up, because if you lighten up any more you're gonna float the fuck away. The problem is not that one of these things is happening, it's that they are all happening, concurrently and constantly.

Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human, to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.

There’s a lot to love about breaking things.

Everyone was so worried about me when I broke my ankle and it confused me. I have a huge, loving family and a solid circle of friends, but these things were something of an abstraction, something to take for granted, and then all of a sudden, they weren't... There were lots of concerned texts and e-mails, and I had to face something I've long pretended wasn't true, for reasons I don't fully understand. If i died, I would leave people behind who would struggle with my loss. I finally recognized that I matter to the people in my life and that I have a responsibility to matter to myself and take care of myself so they don't have to lose me before my time, so I can have more time. When I broke my ankle, love was no longer an abstraction. It became this real, frustrating, messy, necessary thing, and I had a lot of it in my life. It was an overwhelming thing to realize. I am still trying to make sense of it all even though it has always been there.

In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. Characters who don't follow this code become unlikable. Critics who criticize a character's unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability.

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

We fail you every single time a (famous) man treats a woman badly, without legal, professional, or personal consequence. Over and over again we tell you it is acceptable for men — famous, infamous, or not at all famous — to abuse women. We look the other way. We make excuses. We reward these men for their bad behavior. We tell you that, as a young woman, you have little value or place in this society.

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.