Roxane Gay Quotes

There are injustices great and small, and even if we can only fight the small ones, at least we are fighting.

There is a comfort, I suppose, to consuming violence contained in ninety-minute segments, muted by commercials for household goods and communicated to us by former television stars with feathered bang...

There is a happily-ever-after, but the price exacted is terribly high. It is frightening to consider how many women might be willing to pay that price.

They wanted to break me. It was not personal. I was not broken. This

When it comes to fat, there has to be a reason. We need to be able to trace the genealogy of obesity. Without that genealogy, we are simply mystified. People need an explanation for how a person can l...

Writing bridges many differences. Kindness bridges many differences too,

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 privile...

Also understood 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...

If you cannot recognize your privilege, you have a lot of work to do

It’s dangerous to suggest that the targets of oppression are wholly responsible for ending that oppression.

Better is not good enough, and it’s a shame that anyone would be willing to settle for so little.

Even the happiest moments of my life are overshadowed by my body and how it doesn’t fit anywhere. This is no way to live but this is how I live.

He should have been above reproach. As Syreeta McFadden noted, Only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder.

I assumed that he was going to make fun of me because I had long become accustomed to people, men mostly, calling out cruelties from their cars, their bicycles, when they walked on by—letting me know...

I learned how to live in my head, where I could ignore the world that refused to accept me,

I recently enjoyed Always Happy Hour by Mary Miller and Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh—both dark, strange, a bit uncomfortable, sexy.

I was absolutely terrified going into surgery. I realized I have so much life yet to live. I did not want to die. I thought, I don’t want to die, and it was such a strange thought because I’ve never a...

I watch movies like Rosewood or The Help and realize that if I had been born to different parents, at a different time, I too could have been picking cotton or raising a white woman’s babies for less...

Immovable people will not be moved by testimony. Her story becomes an emotional spectacle, something for people to consider, briefly, before moving on to the next sad story.

In July 2013, while in Zurich to attend Tina Turner’s wedding, Winfrey was informed by a store clerk at the Trois Pommes boutique that the purse she was interested in was too expensive for her. We don...