Roxane Gay Quotes

To change the world, we need to face what has become of it. To heal from a trauma, we need to understand the extent of it.

To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged. Surrendering to the acceptance of privilege is difficult, but it is really all that is expected. 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.

As Syreeta McFadden noted, “Only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder.

The ways we are taught to be a girl start when you are very young. When you are being taught, you don't know about the points. When you are being taught to be a girl, the lessons are simply accepted-the price you pay for your curves, your holes. It's only later, when you are older, after you've been taught, that you find out about the score sheet.

She didn't care if he was telling the truth. Milly felt nothing but she was very good at making men think otherwise. Sometimes, she nearly convinced herself.

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

She was smart enough to want more but tired enough to accept the way things were.

If rape culture had a downtown, it would smell like Axe body spray and that perfume they put on tampons to make your vagina smell like laundry detergent.

Angry women are always the villains.

Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don't dare be so alive.

"There are books written by women. There are books written by men. Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special "women's fiction" designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some manner, the female experience, which, apparently, includes the topics of marriage, suburban existence, and parenthood, as if women act alone in these endeavors, wedding themselves, immaculately conceiving children, and the like."

Qui tacet consentire videtur is Latin for “Silence gives consent.” When we say nothing, when we do nothing, we are consenting to these trespasses against us.

You don't necessarily have to do anything once you acknowledge your privilege. You don't have to apologize for it. You need to understand the extent of your privilege, the consequences of your privilege, and remain aware that people who are different from you move through and experience the world in ways you might never know anything about. They might endure situations you can never know anything about. You could, however, use that privilege for the greater good-to try to level the playing field for everyone, to work for social justice, to bring attention to how those without certain privileges are disenfranchised. We've ween what the hoarding of privilege has done, and the results are shameful.

I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.

The body is not a fortress, no matter what we may do to make it such.