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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 107aa25 | It was not as easy to believe these truths as it was to know them. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 18b1e99 | Some serious Scrabble players are poor losers. I am a good loser. I love Scrabble so much I don't care if I lose. I also have to be a good loser because I lose a lot, so practicality plays a role. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 388bf8a | This myth is like heels and purses--pretty but designed to SLOW women down. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 0596103 | Winter is more a state of being than a season, in this place. It takes hold for six or seven dark, cruel months. The cold becomes familiar. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 69fd09f | And then 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 | ||
| 3040dba | At night, I have to face myself and all the ways I have failed. | Roxane Gay | ||
| d6a0438 | I am hyperconscious of how I take up space. As a woman, as a fat woman, I am not supposed to take up space. And yet, as a feminist, I am encouraged to believe I can take up space. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 5df5a8c | 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 founding fathers were only thinking of wealthy white men when they codified this principle, but still, it's a nice idea, that there are some freedoms that cannot be taken away. What this debate shows us is that even in this day and age, the rights .. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 578c41c | 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 exactly what they thought of my body. | Roxane Gay | ||
| f1364a8 | I was so lonely I was willing to tolerate these relationships. The faint resemblance of human connection was enough. It had to be enough even though it wasn't. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 9ec82bd | I loved that feeling, that I was interesting enough to break rules, to believe rules did not apply to me. | Roxane Gay | ||
| d4b86ce | I was always very high-strung about school for many reasons, not the least of which was a pressure to perform and the comfort of knowing that schoolwork, at least, was something in my control. I knew how to study and memorize and make sense of complicated things, as long as they had nothing to do with me. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 11bb7ad | The less space they take up, the more they matter. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 848a025 | A good therapist knows you have to live in the house while you remodel. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 50ad79a | more ambitious and focused because we've never had a choice. We've had to fight to vote, to work outside the home, to work in environments free of sexual harassment, to attend the universities of our choice, and we've also had to prove ourselves over and over to receive any modicum of consideration. | Roxane Gay | ||
| fdcbad1 | I want to be able to hold the why in my hands, to dissect it or tear it apart or burn it and read the ashes even though I am afraid of what I will do with what I see there. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 062b2a6 | These sad stories will always weigh on me, though that burden lessens the more I realize who I am and what I am worth. 73 The thing is, though, loneliness, like losing control of my body, is a matter of accretion. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 24170e8 | He started talking about his marriage. I leaned across the table and pressed two fingers against his lips. 'Let's not do that. Let's not sit here and tell each other everything there is to know about who we once loved. I am tired of listening to men talk about their regrets. | Roxane Gay | ||
| bc84620 | As a naturally shy person, I loved the anonymity of writing before my career took off. I loved how my stories didn't care about my weight. When I started publishing that writing, I loved that, to my readers, what mattered were the words on the page. Through writing, I was, finally, able to gain respect for the content of my character. | feminist writing writing-craft writing-life writing-quotes | Roxane Gay | |
| 571f37c | I was swallowing my secrets and making my body expand and explode. I found ways to hide in plain sight, to keep feeding a hunger that could never be satisfied--the hunger to stop hurting. | Roxane Gay | ||
| b79a24d | People often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves. | Aesop | ||
| a8cd908 | Part of the reason relationships and friendships can be so difficult for me is because there is a part of me that thinks I have to get things just right. I have to say the right things and do the right things or I won't be liked or loved anymore. It's stressful, so then I engage in an elaborate attempt at being the best friend or girlfriend and get further and further away from who I really am, someone with a good heart, but also someone wh.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| f18a87c | O my friend searching for an absurdity necessary to train the self to be tolerant . . . do not reconcile with anything except for this obscure reason. Do not regret a war that ripened you just as August ripens pomegranates on the slopes of stolen mountains." --MAHMOUD DARWISH" | Roxane Gay | ||
| 6d81867 | The idea of a secret that will be revealed always results in one of two scenarios: death and destruction, or self-discovery and recovery beyond our wildest dreams of unification. And in the greatest of sagas, both at the same time. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 49b59f4 | We live in a strange and terrible time for women. There are days when I think it has always been a strange and terrible time to be a woman. Womanhood feels more strange and terrible now because progress has not served women as well as it has served men. We are still stymied by the issues our forbears railed against. It is nothing less than horrifying to realize we live in a culture where the "paper of record" can write an article that comes.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 81bdf31 | Attending boarding school is how upper-middle-class girls run away, to be sure. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 0defb7c | Left to my own devices at boarding school, I lost any semblance of control over what I put into my body. Suddenly, there were all kinds of food available to me. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 9f27fee | The freedom of being able to eat, so extravagantly and without limit, offered me the only true pleasure I knew in high school. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 39f217b | It's hard not to feel humorless, as a woman and a feminist, to recognize misogyny in so many forms, some great and some small, and know you're not imagining things. It's hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you're going to float the fuck away. The problem is not that one of these things is happening; it's that they are all happening, concurrently and constantly. These are just songs. They are just jokes. It's ju.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 8543321 | It was easier to lose myself in the virtual world than to try and put my life back together or face these people who thought they knew me. 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 | ||
| 0bcc3a0 | It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth. Clearly, this lie is damn convincing because the weight-loss industry thrives. Women continue to try to bend themselves to societal will. Women continue to hunger. | Roxane Gay | ||
| b58ddf7 | Because I questioned myself and my sanity and what I was doing wrong in this situation. Because of course I feared that I might be overreacting, overemotional, oversensitive, weak, playing victim, crying wolf, blowing things out of proportion, making things up. Because generations of women have heard that they're irrational, melodramatic, neurotic, hysterical, hormonal, psycho, fragile, and bossy. Because girls are coached out of he womb to.. | harassment rape-culture rape-survivor | Roxane Gay | |
| c67537b | There is, I must admit, something very satisfying about making things from scratch, to know every dish in a meal was made by your own hands. As a lazy person, I'm a fan of premade things, but it was a lot of fun and deeply relaxing to make, for example, my own dough and my own cherry filling for a beautiful cherry pie. I felt productive and capable. | cooking feminism food | Roxane Gay | |
| 9c6cedc | I still carry the weight of being a rape survivor, and of the demand that I forgive and forget to uphold the myth of the perfect black family. I carry the weight handed to me by the Black moral majority, who ignored my father's crimes and who knows how many other men's, who tried to buy off a terrified thirteen year old with a one-day trip to an amusement park. They were so desperate to project the image of the respectable, righteous, pictu.. | rape-culture rape-survivor survival | Roxane Gay | |
| 17b3e45 | Unmoored and in flight, the refugee is vulnerable to every king of harm- from homelessness to fraud- but sexual violence is the most intimate and most public act of brutalization, and it erupts wherever laws and social norms are unraveled. As transit bodies drift in search of sanctuary, gendered violence can buttress a social taxonomy of dominance and oppression, demarcating the tapeable and those with the power to rape, siphoning spheres o.. | rape-culture refugees | Roxane Gay | |
| 94bb7a5 | Anger is the privilege of the truly broken, and yet, I've never met a woman who was broken enough that she allowed herself to be angry. | Roxane Gay | ||
| a482af6 | If you survive, you have to prove it was that bad; or else, they think you are. Surviving is some kind of sin, like floating up off the dunking stool like a witch. You have to be permanently ecorchee, heart-on-sleeve, offering up organs and body parts like a medieval female saint. | rape-culture survivor survivors-of-abuse | Roxane Gay | |
| 1ea4754 | It is untenable to go through life as an exposed wound. | hurting life triggers | Roxane Gay | |
| 0bea658 | 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. | Roxane Gay | ||
| d961b19 | In the self-defense class, our teacher taught us that if we couldn't imagine doing something- cracking an assailant in the head with a stapler, opening up a can of pepper spray on an attacker, digging our keys into the eyes of a would-be rapist- we wouldn't be able to act in a real crisis. Wielding the stapler, the pepper spray, and the keys, our teacher taught us the power of visualization, and I learned to imagine in advance what I might .. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 908997c | 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 the darkest kind of fairy tale, one where controlling, obsessive, and borderline abusive tendencies are made to seem intensely desirable by offering the reader big heaping spoonfuls of sweet, sweet sex sugar to make the medicine go down. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 279480e | It's not that I don't want to love unharmed people; I just don't understand them. | Roxane Gay | ||
| d03d720 | Sometimes she forgets and leaves her house in a skirt or a tank top because it's a warm day and she wants to feel warm air on her bare skin. Before long, she remembers. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 2639833 | Feminism has certainly helped me find my voice. Feminism has helped me believe my voice matters, even in this world where there are so many voices demanding to be heard. | Roxane Gay |