Roxane Gay Quotes

I’ve been thinking about how so much testimony is demanded of women, and still, there are those who doubt our stories. There

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.

In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be.

Every Friday afternoon Brad invites me to join him and his frat buddies for a game of basketball at the Y. Every Friday I remind Brad I don’t know how to play basketball. This confuses him. Someday I’...

I taste the idea of grocery shopping without strangers taking food they disapprove of out of my cart or offering me unsolicited nutrition advice.

I wanted a relationship where I could be independent but loved and looked after at the same time.

I very much like men. They're interesting to me, and I mostly wish they would be better about how they treat women so I wouldn't have to call them out so often.

I was a daydreamer and I resented being pulled out of my daydreams to deal with the business of living.

Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning.This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone.We all have history. You...

Narratives about certain experiences are somehow legitimized when mediated through a man’s perspective. Consider the work of John Updike or Richard Yates. Most of their fiction is grounded in domestic...

My other wardrobe, the one that dominates most of my closet, is full of the clothes I don’t have the courage to wear.

Women’s fiction is often considered a more intimate brand of storytelling that doesn’t tackle the big issues found in men’s fiction.

The United States as we know it was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, the idea that some rights are so sacrosanct not even a government can take them away. Of course, this country’s foun...

It is untenable to go through life as an exposed wound. No matter how well intended, trigger warnings will not stanch the bleeding; trigger warnings will not harden into scabs over your wounds.

I knew where danger really lurked—in the woods behind well-manicured exclusive suburban neighborhoods, at the hands of good boys from good families.

My family’s concern became a constant chorus of nagging, always well intended, but mostly a reminder of how I was a failure in the most basic of my human responsibilities—maintaining my body.

These terms themselves are somewhat horrifying. Obese is an unpleasant word from the Latin obesus, meaning having eaten until fat, which is, in a literal sense, fair enough. But when people use the wo...

My amusement with the Fifty Shades series only goes so far. The books are, essentially, a detailed primer for how to successfully engage in a controlling, abusive relationship. The trilogy represents...

We need to stop playing Privilege or Oppression Olympics because we’ll never get anywhere until we find more effective ways of talking through difference. We should be able to say, This is my truth, a...

We expect role models to model the behaviors we are perfectly capable of modeling ourselves.