Roxane Gay Quotes

Perhaps the most horrifying thing about nonconsensual sex is that, in an instant, it erases you. Your own desires, your safety and well-being, your ownership of the body that may very well have been the only thing you ever felt sure you owned — all of it becomes irrelevant, even nonexistent. You don’t need to be a helpless, innocent child to be changed by that.

This is rape's legacy, the countless deaths women die just trying to keep existing in the world as it is.

She was a mess. So what? We are all stinking messes, every last one of us, or we once were messes and found our way out, or we are trying to find our way out of a mess, scratching, reaching.

I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.

For difficult women, who should be celebrated for their very nature

Summary If a boy treats you like you’re special, it’s probably because he wants to come and not because you are a treasure he discovered. You are not a treasure. You are a thing a boy can use to make him ejaculate. This makes sense because you already believe this at your core. You have been taught.

If rape culture had its own cuisine, it would be all this shit you have to swallow.

Even from a young age I undersood that when a girl is unlikable, a girl is a problem. I also understand that I wasn't being intentionally mean. I was being honest (admittedly, without tact), and I was being human. It is either a blessing or a curse that those are rarely likable qualities in a woman.

The moment we see a pop artifact offering even a sliver of something different — say, a woman who isn’t a size zero or who doesn't treat a man as the center of the universe — we cling to it desperately because that representation is all we have.

To be clear, the fat acceptance movement is important, affirming, and profoundly necessary, but I also believe that part of fat acceptance is accepting that some of us struggle with body image and haven’t reached a place of peace and unconditional self-acceptance.

I have tried to make peace with this body. I have tried to love or at least tolerate this body in a world that displays nothing but contempt for it.

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).

The part I wanted them to understand is that these equations can implode, constricting your whole life, until one day you're sitting in a locked steel box breathing through an airhole with a straw and wondering, 'Now? Now am I safe?

I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.

Death is a tragedy whether it is in the death of one girl-woman in London or seventy-seven men, women, and children in Norway. We know this, but perhaps it needs to be said over and over again so we do not forget.

I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.