Roxane Gay Quotes

#1. 2014 was a year of intense social upheaval. In truth, the same could be said for most every year. There is no standstill in a world filled with so many people, scrambling for so much.

Roxane Gay

#2. Want nothing but the best for your friends because when your friends are happy and successful, it's probably going to be easier for you to be happy.

Roxane Gay

#3. I am failing as a woman. I am failing as a feminist. To freely accept the feminist label would not be fair to good feminists. If I am, indeed, a feminist, I am a rather bad one. I am a mess of contradictions.

Roxane Gay

#4. I love how I can see [on Twitter] some of the thoughts and ideas of my favorite cultural figures and still also chatter with my friends and family. It's a cocktail party with a fraction of the awkwardness of an actual cocktail party.

Roxane Gay

#5. I believe feminism is grounded in supporting the choices of women even if we wouldn't make certain choices for ourselves.

Roxane Gay

#6. I've always wanted to be a writer. I've been writing since I was probably four years old - it was nonsense, but it was still my little attempts at being a storyteller.

Roxane Gay

#7. I'm sick of hearing, thinking and talking about Woody Allen. Nonetheless, the allegations against him continue to capture our national attention because so much of the story is strange and sordid.

Roxane Gay

#8. Day after day with them, I see more and more of my parents in me. I see where all my quirks come from. I see my future.

Roxane Gay

#9. Feminism is just an idea. It's a philosophy. It's about the equality of women in all realms. It's not about man-hating. It's not about being humorless. We have to let go of these misconceptions that have plagued feminism for 40, 50 years.

Roxane Gay

#10. I am mortified by my music choices.

Roxane Gay

#11. I was in love with the idea of love, so I created elaborate fictions for my relationships - fictions that allowed me to believe that what any given paramour and I shared looked a lot like love.

Roxane Gay

#12. I see my tweets as a current joining a bunch of other currents in the world's craziest ocean.

Roxane Gay

#13. Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Roxane Gay

#14. The open letter has always been an interesting rhetorical strategy - a way of delivering a pointed message to a specific individual or group while also reaching a wide audience.

Roxane Gay

#15. Margaret Sanger didn't just introduce the idea of birth control into our culture at large, she freed women from indenture to their bodies.

Roxane Gay

#16. When I was a child, my parents took my brothers and me to Port-au-Prince during the summer so we could get to know the country of our ancestors. Because Haiti is an island, the beach is everywhere. Haitians are particular, even snobby, about beaches.

Roxane Gay

#17. Just because you survive something does not mean you are strong.

Roxane Gay

#18. Love your friends' kids, even if you don't want or like children. Just do it.

Roxane Gay

#19. I think it was really entering my 30s that I began to embrace feminism and call myself a feminist.

Roxane Gay

#20. Internet outrage can seem mindless, but it rarely is. To make that assumption is dismissive. There's something beneath the outrage - an unwillingness to be silent in the face of ignorance, hatred or injustice. Outrage may not always be productive, but it is far better than silence.

Roxane Gay

#21. If you feel like it's hard to be friends with women, consider that maybe women aren't the problem. Maybe it's just you.

Roxane Gay

#22. I recognize that I'm human, and the older I get, the more I realize how fallible I am, how fallible we all are.

Roxane Gay

#23. For celebrities, privacy is utterly nonexistent. You are asked intrusive questions about your personal life. You can be photographed at any moment.

Roxane Gay

#24. I can consider not only great art, but the context in which that art has been created. I can consider the people who paid a price for that art to be created and whether or not I want to appreciate that art on their backs.

Roxane Gay

#25. Feminism is, I hope, a way to a better future for everyone who inhabits this world. Feminism should not be something that needs a seductive marketing campaign. The idea of women moving through the world as freely as men should sell itself.

Roxane Gay

#26. When you look past the image, a celebrity is merely a person you know nothing about.

Roxane Gay

#27. The first amendment makes it clear that we are free to practice religion without government interference. The Constitution also establishes the separation of church and state so that the laws we live by our never guided by religious zeal.

Roxane Gay

#28. It's so hard to write about countries like Haiti because there's truths behind the misperceptions people have. But there's so much more. There are multiple truths.

Roxane Gay

#29. In Hollywood, a normal-size body is unruly.

Roxane Gay

#30. It would be easy to assume that the open letter is a symptom of the Internet age. Such is not the case. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin wrote an open letter to the prime minister of Great Britain, Lord North - a satirical call for the imposition of martial law in the colonies.

Roxane Gay

#31. We all have our vanities. The retouching magazines like 'Vogue' do is the professional version of the retouching we do when we, for example, apply Instagram filters to the pictures we take and share on our social networks.

Roxane Gay

#32. We have cellphones and smartphones and iDevices and laptops and the ability to be perpetually connected. We never have to miss anything, significant or insignificant.

Roxane Gay

#33. I think Lena Dunham is a very bright and very interesting writer, and what she's accomplished at such a young age absolutely impresses me.

Roxane Gay

#34. A lot of ink is given over to mythologizing female friendships as curious, fragile relationships that are always intensely fraught. Stop reading writing that encourages this mythology.

Roxane Gay

#35. I cut an imposing figure. I am large, and I'm tall, and I have tattoos. I am actually really quiet and shy, but maybe people see me, and they don't want to step out of line, or equate disagreement with stepping out of line with a writer they like.

Roxane Gay

#36. I tend to write three to four hours a day, depending - oftentimes very late at night. When I write on Twitter, I do other things: I'm working, grading, or reading, and I'm procrastinating, and I'll pop on Twitter and be like, 'Hey, what's up? Yogurt's delicious.'

Roxane Gay

#37. When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.

Roxane Gay

#38. Pink is my favourite colour. I used to say my favourite colour was black to be cool, but it is pink - all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink.

Roxane Gay

#39. I don't want the whole of my writing or my intellectual energy given over to race because I have diverse interests.

Roxane Gay

#40. There are all kinds of people who continue to be largely ignored by advertisers, whose lives largely go unseen. They deserve their moment.

Roxane Gay

#41. I live in the middle of nowhere and I'm an insomniac. I just make the time and I read and write really fast so that makes a lot possible for me. I wish I had an explanation for it. I'm grateful for it.

Roxane Gay

#42. When women respond negatively to misogynistic or rape humor, they are "sensitive" and branded as "feminist," a word that has, as of late, become a catchall term for "woman who does not tolerate bullshit.

Roxane Gay

#43. Just write and love what you're writing. And if you're not loving what you're writing, take a look at why and fix that.

Roxane Gay

#44. I support anything that broadens the message of gender equality and tempers the stigma of the feminist label. We run into trouble, though, when we celebrate celebrity feminism while avoiding the actual work of feminism.

Roxane Gay

#45. I am totally down with disagreement. I don't like Haterade, but disagreement is wonderful. When someone disagrees, we try to reach common ground. That's good.

Roxane Gay

#46. I think one of the most important things we can do as feminists is acknowledge that, even though we have womanhood in common, we have to start to think about the ways in which we're different, how those differences affect us, and what kinds of needs we have based on our differences.

Roxane Gay

#47. I play on my phone in public quite a lot. I pretend that I'm getting a very important message that I must attend to immediately. You will often see me in the middle of a huge crowd just staring intently at my phone because I just don't even know how I should interact with other humans.

Roxane Gay

#48. I reject the idea that when young women make choices with which we disagree, they are acting without autonomy.

Roxane Gay

#49. Demands for solidarity can quickly turn into demands for groupthink, making it difficult to express nuance.

Roxane Gay

#50. I am a bad feminist and a good woman. I am trying to become better in how I think and say and do - without abandoning what makes me human.

Roxane Gay

#51. In Haiti, beach bodies are simply bodies, and beach reads are simply books, because the beach is all around you.

Roxane Gay

#52. If I were ever to grace the pages of 'Vogue,' I would want my image retouched because the audience is so vast. There is great vulnerability in being exposed to that many judging eyes. I feel no small amount of guilt over this willingness to surrender my ideals.

Roxane Gay

#53. People don't want to think ... I mean, they don't! They just want to say, 'Oh, okay, feminists are humorless man-haters,' and that's simply not the case. There are radical people and radical ideas in absolutely every movement, but that doesn't mean they define the ideals.

Roxane Gay

#54. I read too many romance novels during my formative years. I have a penchant for romantic comedies. I understand why 'Romeo and Juliet' came to such a pass.

Roxane Gay

#55. If I am ever in the spotlight, I want to look good.

Roxane Gay

#56. As I started to think about how I can claim feminism while also acknowledging my humanity and my imperfections, 'bad feminism' simply seemed like the best answer.

Roxane Gay

#57. I am not easy to love but I am well loved. I try to love well in return.

Roxane Gay

#58. So many of us are reaching out, hoping someone out there will grab our hands and remind us we are not as alone as we fear.

Roxane Gay

#59. So often feminism is built up as this thing where you have to be perfect. You have to be consistent and you can't ever deviate. That's just not realistic.

Roxane Gay

#60. We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.

Roxane Gay

#61. Violence is not the answer but neither is peace.

Roxane Gay

#62. There's certainly a portion of my brain that is always tuned to making wry observations about the world, but that portion of my brain was alive and well before Twitter.

Roxane Gay

#63. You have to be consistent. You have to be yourself. You have to be committed to what you're doing. You have to not be afraid to be ambitious.

Roxane Gay

#64. My parents have been married for 42 years. Their marriage has been - from what I can see - a happy one.

Roxane Gay

#65. There has been, and there will continue to be, vigorous discussions about race in America. I worry that little will come of these discussions because we aren't addressing what must be done to change the current racial climate.

Roxane Gay

#66. With my writing, I generally just pretend that no one's reading it. I allow myself that delusion so that I can write the things that I write.

Roxane Gay

#67. I want to take the time to think through how I feel and why I feel. I don't want to feign expertise on matters I know nothing about for the purpose of offering someone else my immediate reaction for their consumption.

Roxane Gay

#68. Something outrageous, in the truest sense of the word, is always happening. On social networks, we're always voicing our reactions to these outrageous events. We read essays and 'think pieces' about these outrageous events. We comment on the commentary. We do this because we can.

Roxane Gay

#69. Living in a rural town really compelled me to start tweeting so much. Mostly, my Twitter usage is fueled by loneliness. I can go days without talking to another human being unless it's my mother, especially when I'm not teaching or on break.

Roxane Gay

#70. I have never dreamed of being a princess. I have not longed for Prince Charming. I have and do long for something resembling a happily ever after. I am supposed to be above such flights of fantasy, but I am not. I am enamored of fairy tales.

Roxane Gay

#71. Most of my favorite tweets go completely ignored but most of my favorite tweets are probably really lame or inside jokes between me and my [redacted]. See what I did there?

Roxane Gay

#72. Most of the serious disagreement I get comes through email or social media, where people are more comfortable.

Roxane Gay

#73. I try to understand faith and religion. I was raised by wonderful Catholic parents who were deeply faithful and taught us that God is a God of love.

Roxane Gay

#74. The expansive anarchy of the Internet continues to lull us into believing that, because we can see something, that something should be seen. Because we can say something, there is something that must be said.

Roxane Gay

#75. I have never been married. I don't know if I will ever marry, though I hope to. When I am asked why I have not married, I explain that my parents have been happily married for 42 years. The bar feels so very high for that kind of commitment.

Roxane Gay

#76. If a woman wants to take her husband's name, that's her choice, and I still think she can be feminist while doing that.

Roxane Gay

#77. Maybe true love isn't out there for me, but I can sublimate my loneliness with the notion that true love is out there for someone.

Roxane Gay

#78. I wrote myself back together. I wrote myself toward a stronger version of myself ... Through writing and feminism, I also found that if I was a little bit brave, another woman might hear me and see me and recognize that none of us are the nothing the world tries to tell us we are.

Roxane Gay

#79. Books are often far more than just books.

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#80. There is an odd assumption that compassion and care are finite or that critics can be everything to everyone - commenting on everything simply because they can. That's not what cultural criticism is.

Roxane Gay

#81. In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed.

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#82. I am 39. I am single. I am a black woman. I have too many advanced degrees. Many a news story tells me finding true love is likely a hopeless proposition. Now is the time when I need to believe in fairy tales.

Roxane Gay

#83. When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume, even though the lyrics are degrading to women and offend me to my core. I am mortified by my music choices.

Roxane Gay

#84. The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.

Roxane Gay

#85. I think the world is ambivalent about feminism. So I can't blame college students. I think they're reflecting the greater culture's attitude toward feminism. So what I can do is, in ways that are appropriate, advocate for feminism and help the students learn what feminism is about.

Roxane Gay

#86. Writing has always allowed me to escape. I was a very lonely child. Because I was very socially awkward, I would always have trouble making friends. And so reading and writing allowed me to have friends and to have an active imaginary life that really sort of kept me sane.

Roxane Gay

#87. When advertisers ignore diversity, it is because they don't think the lives of others matter. There is not enough of a financial imperative for those lives to matter.

Roxane Gay

#88. You can't control the fact that you are born a white man or born into wealth. When people say, 'Check your privilege,' they're saying, 'Acknowledge how these factors helped you move through life.' They're not saying apologize for it.

Roxane Gay

#89. I keep trying to imagine a universe in which too many public figures declaring themselves feminists would be a bad thing.

Roxane Gay

#90. After the Boston Marathon bombings, people shared grief and outrage on social media.

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#91. That's what is always fascinating about racism - how it is allowed, if not encouraged, to flourish freely in public spaces, the way racism and bigotry are so often unquestioned.

Roxane Gay

#92. Writing, at its best and truest, can offer solace and salvation for both readers and writers.

Roxane Gay

#93. I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.

Roxane Gay

#94. My tweeting is cool and calm unless I am riled up about something and then I just surrender to the fury of my fingers.

Roxane Gay

#95. If people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.

Roxane Gay

#96. Placing Margaret Sanger on the $20 bill will remind us of what she has done for women and our reproductive health and how the fight for reproductive freedom is an ongoing one.

Roxane Gay

#97. I have known beaches, but I have no particular fondness for them. I don't like sand in my crevices. I don't like sand at all. I don't enjoy all that sunshine and heat without the benefit of climate control.

Roxane Gay

#98. Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses--pretty but designed to SLOW women down.

Roxane Gay

#99. We have to believe that we can hold different points of view without labeling each other bad feminists.

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#100. It's disheartening that people think that Donald Sterling is the outlier and that he's the exception and not the rule.

Roxane Gay