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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bdeb679 | She got on the treadmill, started running. Bianca's muscles stretched away from her bones and she fell into a comfortable gait. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 5e3ae9c | When she grew tired, she crawled into her empty bed, lay on her side, traced the slight indentation where her ex-husband used to sleep. "This is my life," she said to the empty room. "I am grateful." Then she tried to master faith." | Roxane Gay | ||
| 2c06e11 | Even though he had no strength left, he was not gentle. She fell off the bed onto the damp floor. The next morning, Dean was gone. He took nothing with him but the mold spores growing in his lungs. If she were prone to the maudlin, Bianca would admit that he also took her heart. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 7ac89a3 | I think about how fucked up it is to promote this idea that our truest selves are thin women hiding in our fat bodies like imposters, usurpers, illegitimates. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 0ed5cc5 | My husband is not a kind man and with him, I am not a good person. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and he, Caleb, is kneeling over me, his fingers tracing my neck. I place my hands over his, the rough skin, the swollen knuckles. I squeeze. | Roxane Gay | ||
| a99bc25 | No one shines more luridly on this faux-real stage than a woman. Whether it's a modeling competition, a chance to compete for love, a weight-loss challenge, or a look into the lives of an aging magazine publisher's harem, women are often the brightly polished trophies in the display case of reality television. The genre has developed a very successful formula for reducing women to an awkward series of stereotypes about low self-esteem, mari.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 2f0760f | How are we going to make a thirteen-year-old pop singer popular?" I ask, briefly steering the conversation toward work. Tate is silent for a few moments. Finally she says, "Old white ladies who perm their hair." We are very good at our jobs." | Roxane Gay | ||
| 12eebea | In our culture, we talk a lot about change and growing up, but man, we don't talk nearly enough about how difficult it is. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 14babeb | I've never feared for my life. I've never been in a situation where I couldn't walk away. Does this make me a lucky girl? Given the stories I've heard from other women, yes, it does make me a lucky girl. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 3f37c6f | Amy talks about the temptation of being the woman a man wants, but ultimately she doesn't give in to the temptation to be "the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn't ever complain." Unlikable women refuse to give in to that temptation. They are, instead, themselves. They accept the consequences of their choices, and those consequences become stories worth reading." | Roxane Gay | ||
| 06a2803 | I was still broken and I liked how it felt to simply accept that everything was wrong and couldn't be set right. It felt good to not try and pretend. | Roxane Gay | ||
| fe56dae | Pointing out the many ways in which misogyny persists and harms women is not anger. Conceding the idea that anger is an inappropriate reaction to the injustice women face backs women into an unfair position. Nor does disagreement mean we are blind to the ways in which progress has been made. Feminists are celebrating our victories and acknowledging our privilege when we have it. We're simply refusing to settle. We're refusing to forget how .. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 327aa8d | 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'm going to become Brad's boss. The very first thing I will do is fire him. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 91e512a | I was so free. I was free, in a prison of my own making. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 7c73aaa | people tend to assume that everyone moves through the world the way they do. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 092c8d8 | All the more reason for you to go | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 7bb83a4 | Adoro estar com alguem infinitamente interessante porque somos tao diferentes. Querer pertencer a pessoas, ou a uma delas, nao significa encontrar no espelho uma imagem de si mesmo. | Roxane Gay | ||
| da1dbce | Quando voce tem sucesso de inicio em uma empreitada, acaba se convencendo de que facilmente repetira esse sucesso. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 6d2410b | Nao queira nada que nao seja o melhor para seus amigos, porque, quando eles sao felizes e bem-sucedidos, provavelmente se tornara mais facil para voce ser feliz tambem. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 14f3eaf | Despite this inundation of rape imagery, where we are immersed in a rape culture--one that is overly permissive toward all manner of sexual violence--not enough victims of gang rape speak out about the toll the experience exacts. The right stories are not being told, or we're not writing enough about the topic of rape in the right ways. Perhaps we too casually use the term "rape culture" to address the very specific problems that rise from .. | language-barrier rape-culture sexual-violence toxic-masculinity | Roxane Gay | |
| 08606ea | When we're talking about race or religion or politics, it is often said we need to speak carefully. These are difficult topics where we need to be vigilant not only in what we say but also in how we express ourselves. That same care must extend to how we write about violence and sexual violence in particular. | rape-culture sexual-violence toxic-masculinity | Roxane Gay | |
| 113c8c7 | I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I'm not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I'm right. I am just trying--trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself: a woman who loves pink and likes to get freaky and sometimes dances her.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| b3f54d1 | I am determined to be more than my body--what my body has endured, what my body has become. Determination, though, has not gotten me very far. | determination endurance | Roxane Gay | |
| ef6ecfb | I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, "You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person." This caricature is how feminists have been warped by the people who fear feminism most, the same people who have the most to lose when feminism succeeds." | Roxane Gay | ||
| 56e23cd | was interested in the discourse around rape culture because the phrase is used often, but rarely do people engage with what it actually means. What is it like to live in a culture where it often seems like it is a question of when, not if, a woman will encounter some kind of sexual violence? What is it like for men to navigate this culture whether they are indifferent to rape culture or working to end it or contributing to it in ways signif.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 973de15 | This world and its unwillingness to accept and accommodate me are the problem. But I suspect it is more likely that I can change before this culture and its attitudes toward fat people will change. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 80eb17e | When I get my makeup done for television appearances while I am promoting a book or when I am asked to comment on pop culture or the political climate, I feel like I'm wearing a mask I have no right to wear. The makeup feels far thicker than it really is. I feel like people are staring at me, laughing at me for daring to think I could do anything to make myself more presentable. And I remember how I felt the one time I tried to look pretty .. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 267d7d0 | The thing about shame is that there are depths. I have no idea where the bottom of my shame resides. | Roxane Gay | ||
| f9d0c8e | stories and daydreaming. Sports were merely a distraction keeping me from what I really wanted to do. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 71d60d2 | I've always been a woman of contradiction. My true loves were and still are books and writing | Roxane Gay | ||
| 59b302d | It never crossed my mind that I had a choice in the matter once I was told no. | Roxane Gay | ||
| d19ba3d | He has sometimes likened his style of writing to that of a medic performing a post-mortem on a raped child--whose job is to analyse the injuries, not to give vent to the rage that is felt." --SUSIE MACKENZIE ON J. G. BALLARD, GUARDIAN," | Roxane Gay | ||
| efa2a37 | also enjoyed that the orthopedic surgeon was incredibly attractive, knew it, and had the swagger of a man who is very good at what he does and very well compensated for that work. That was Saturday. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 8cdd4a3 | We have all manner of music glorifying the degradation of women, and damnit, that music is catchy so I often find myself singing along as my very being is diminished. Singers like Robin Thicke know "we want it." Rappers like Jay-Z use the word "bitch" like punctuation. Movies, more often than not, tell the stories of men as if men's stories are the only stories that matter. When women are involved, they are sidekicks, the romantic interests.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 2488ff2 | One of the many things I have always loved about writing, not to be confused with publishing, is that all you need is your imagination. It doesn't matter who you are, you can write. Your looks, especially, don't matter. | imagination writing | Roxane Gay | |
| aa9ad7a | Later, I am still awake because I'm not very good at sleeping and I'm achy so I'm feeling tender toward him. Instead of nudging him awake, telling him to go home, I watch him sleep. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 6ce9478 | When you can't find someone to follow, you have to find a way to lead by example. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 56670ad | For so long I've never talked about this. I suppose we should keep our shames to ourselves, but I'm sick of this shame. Silence hasn't worked out that well. Or maybe this is someone else's shame and I'm just being forced to carry it. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 1e82103 | I am always holding on to the hope of tomorrow. | Roxane Gay | ||
| a1077f9 | In the New York Times Book Review Chloe Schama writes, "A plague of women's backs is upon us in the book cover world." | Roxane Gay | ||
| 935d474 | But sometimes speaking is so hard! It's like standing still, then sprinting. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 5b234f0 | Are you from Detroit? I have been asked this question twenty-three times since moving to the area. In a month, I will stop counting, having reached a four-digit number. Shortly after that, I will begin telling people I have recently arrived from Africa. They will nod and exhale excitedly and ask about my tribe. I don't know that in this moment so there is little to comfort me. I shake my head. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 15b4176 | The girl-woman singer died in her flat, alone in bed. Too many people said, "It was to be expected," because we knew this girl who was a woman was really a girl. We knew she had problems, and she did not have the luxury the rest of us do to handle our problems privately, with dignity. 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 .. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 6fe8e8c | Bottomless. Fearless. This is the reputation I developed in my social circle. One of those things was true. | Roxane Gay |