Roxane Gay Quotes

With age comes self-awareness, or something that looks like self-awareness, and so I try to be on the lookout for patterns of behavior, choices I’m making where I’m trying too hard, giving too much, reaching too intently for being right when right is what someone else wants me to be. It’s scary, though, trying to be yourself and hoping yourself is enough. It’s scary believing that you, as you are, could never be enough.

You are your body, nothing more, and your body should damn well become less.

I loved the escape of writing those stories, of imagining lives that were different from my own. I had a ferocious imagination. I was a daydreamer and I resented being pulled out of my daydreams to deal with the business of living. In my stories, I could write myself the friends I did not have. I could make so many things possible that I did not dare imagine for myself. I could be brave. I could be smart. I could be funny. I could be everything I ever wanted. When I wrote, it was so easy to be happy.

At some point, we have to stop selling every black child in this country the idea that he or she only needs to hold a ball or a microphone to achieve something.

Anisha tells me, “A good therapist knows you have to live in the house while you remodel.

I was too smart and that made people uncomfortable — most folks where we've lived our whole lives don't trust too much intelligence in a woman. There is also the problem of my eyes — they don't hide anything. If I don't care for a person, my eyes make it plain. I don't care for most. Folks are generally comfortable with the small lies they tell each other. They don't know what to do with someone like me, who mostly doesn't bother with small lies.

We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgment rather than accusation.

We must stop pointing to the exceptions — these bright shining stars who transcend circumstance. We must look to how we can best support the least among us, not spend all our time blindly revering and trying to mimic the greatest without demanding systemic change.

Maybe I’m a bad feminist, but I am deeply committed to the issues important to the feminist movement. I have strong opinions about misogyny, institutional sexism that consistently places women at a disadvantage, the inequity in pay, the cult of beauty and thinness, the repeated attacks on reproductive freedom, violence against women, and on and on. I am as committed to fighting fiercely for equality as I am committed to disrupting the notion that there is an essential feminism.

Angry women care. Angry women speak and yell and sob their truths.

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

Fifty Shades is about a man finding peace and happiness because he finally finds a woman willing to tolerate his bullshit for long enough.

Everything I know about my family’s history, I know in fragments. We are the keepers of secrets. We are secrets ourselves. We try to protect each other from the geography of so much sorrow. I don’t know that we succeed.

What I know and what I feel are two very different things.

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