Roxane Gay Quotes

It's okay if most of your friends are guys, but if you champion this as a commentary on the nature of female friendships, soul search a little.

I am quite content to be in my thirties, and nothing affirms that more than being around people in their late teens and early twenties.

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

I am not the same scared girl that I was. I have let the right ones in.

If you are reading this essay, you have some kind of privilege. It may be hard to hear that, I know, but if you cannot recognize your privilege, you have a lot of work to do; get started.

We tend to believe that accusations of privilege imply we have it easy, which we resent because life is hard for nearly everyone. Of course we resent these accuastions. Look at white men when they are accused of having privilege. They tend to be immediately defensive (and, at times, understandably so).

I reserve my most elaborate delusions and disappointments for myself.

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.

Trauma shapes all our lives, in so many ways. We are walking wounds, but I am not sure any of us know quite how to talk about it.

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.

I will never forgive the boys who raped me and I am a thousand percent comfortable with that because forgiving them will not free me from anything. I

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

Black woman are rarely allowed their femininity.

Fix the Family, a conservative, Catholic “family values” organization, published a list of reasons why families should not send their daughters to college. The list is not satirical.

words in the Oxford English Dictionary? antidisestablishmentarianism — in short, conservatism; getting in the way of change. floccinaucinihilipilification — the action or habit of estimating something as worthless. MY FATHER’S FAVORITE COMEBACK IN AN ARGUMENT: “DON’T be facetious.” Nothing I said had meaning. It was always simplistic, flippant, juvenile, unsubstantiable, silly, girlish. The synonyms pile up, evacuating whatever claim I’d made, whatever feeling or fact stood behind the claim, turning my mouth into a black hole. Now, educated by Rebecca Solnit and Sarah Seltzer, I’d knowingly call what he was doing gaslighting, sealioning, lollipopping. Actually, I’d go one better: I’d call it Cordelia-ing: “Nothing comes from nothing. Speak again.” The rendering of a daughter as puppet, scripted, voice too sweet and low to carry meaning. No. I’d call it floccinaucinihilipilification. All the mansplaining tactics summed up: the action and habit of estimating something as worthless. It worked.