Quotes by Roxane Gay

Often, when I read the news, I have to make sure I am not, in face, reading The Onion. We continue to have national and state debates about abortion, birth control, and reproductive freedom, and men, mostly, are directing that debate. That is the stuff of satire.

Often, when I read the news, I have to make sure I am not, in fact, reading The Onion. We continue to have national and state debates about abortion, birth control, and reproductive freedom, and men, mostly, are directing that debate. That is the stuff of satire.

On the scale of relevance, public approval or disapproval of a womans choices should not merit measure.

On my more difficult days, Im not sure whats more of a pain in my ass -- being black or being a woman. Im happy to be both of these things, but the world keeps intervening.

Feminism, as of late, has suffered from a certain guilt by association because we conflate feminism with women who advocate feminism as part of their personal brand. When these figureheads say what we want to hear, we put them up on the Feminist Pedestal, and when they do something we dont like, we knock them right off and then say theres something wrong with feminism because our feminist leaders have failed us. We forget the difference between feminism and Professional Feminists.

How do we reconcile the imperfections of feminism with all the good it can do? In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. For whatever reason, we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. 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.

The problem with movements is that, all too often, they are associated only with the most visible figures, the people with the biggest platforms and the loudest, most provocative voices. But feminism is not whatever philosophy is being spouted by the popular media feminist flavor of the week, at least not entirely.

Feminisms failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we dont regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come.

In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. For whatever reason, we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. 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.

If people cannot be flawed in fiction theres no place left for us to be human.

I followed many conversations about what happened in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse because they happened one after the next. Too many of those conversations tried to conflate the two events, tried to create some kind of hierarchy of tragedy, grief, call, response. There was so much judgment, so much interrogation of grief—how dare we mourn a singer, an entertainer, a girl-woman who struggled with addiction, as if the life of an addict is somehow less worthy a life, as if we are not entitled to mourn unless the tragedy happens to the right kind of people. How dare we mourn a singer when across an ocean seventy-seven people are dead? We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly.

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.

The ladies in her classes loved to speak to Caridad in broken Spanish, to show her they were comfortable with her ethnicity despite the paleness of their skin and the wealth of their husbands.

One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. Ive struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because Im weird, because I live in my head. When I was young, we moved around a lot, so there was rarely any time to get to know a new place, let alone new people. Loneliness was the one familiar thing, making me this bottomless pit of need, open and gaping and desperate for anything to fill me up.

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

All to often, suffering exists in a realm beyond vocabulary so we navigate that realm awkwardly, fumbling for the right words, hoping we can somehow approximate an understanding of matters that should never have to be understood by anyone in any place in the world.

Whenever governments wanted to achieve some end, often involving population growth, they restricted access to birth control and/or criminalized birth control unless, of course, the population growth concerned the poor, in which case, contraception was enthusiastically promoted. Historically, society has only wanted the right kind of people to have a right to life. We shouldnt forget that fact.

For a moment, Milly couldnt breathe as her anger flew out of her chest and into her mouth. She ran her tongue over it, hard and bitter, then swallowed it again.

To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance.

All too often, when we see injustices, both great and small, we think, Thats terrible, but we do nothing. We say nothing. We let other people fight their own battles. We remain silent because silence is easier. Qui tacet consentire videtur is Latin for Silence gives consent. When we say nothing, when we do nothing, we are consenting to these trespasses against us.