Roxane Gay Quotes

What about other women of color? For Hispanic and Latina women, Indian women, Middle Eastern women, Asian women, their absence in popular culture is even more pronounced, their need for relief just as palpable and desperate.

It's scary believing that you, as you are, could ever be enough.

I was a shy girl, but when I read, I was adventurous. Books made me bolder.

The ultimate decision [of wearing hijab] must be that of the individual. Western opinions on the hijab or burkas are rather irrelevant. We don't get to decide for Muslim women what does or does not oppress them, no matter how highly we think of ourselves.

Their God is angry and unkind because they made him in their image.

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

It was a moment when I understood that all of us have to be more considerate of the realities of the bodies of others.

YOU RECOGNIZE THE TENSION BETWEEN “I AM A BODY” AND “I have a body,” but you are unable to resolve it. “Have” implies that this body is just a possession, that it can be lost or thrown away. That you can do without it. It implies, perhaps, that someone else could have your body and that your body would be not your own. That it would belong to another. That doesn’t feel quite right. But “am” doesn’t seem right either. To “be” a body suggests that you are only a body. You are meat and some blood. You are hard bones and flexing cartilage. You are tangled veins and skin. Is that all, though?

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

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.

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.

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

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?

Because I am not a touchy-feely person, I always feel this light shock, this surprise, really, when my skin comes into contact with another person’s skin. Sometimes that shock is pleasant, like Oh, here is my body in the world. Sometimes, it is not. I never know which it will be.

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, an