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Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay Quotes

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Famous Roxane Gay Quotes

“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 shouldn't forget that fact.”

GovernmentPovertyBirth Control
Book:Bad Feminist
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“Why do we view the boundaries people create for themselves as challenges? Why do we see someone setting a limit and then try to push? Once, I was at a restaurant with a large group of people and the waitress kept touching me. It was really fucking annoying because I don't want to be touched like that unless we are in a sexual relationship. Every time she passed by, she would rub my shoulders or run her hand down my arm and I kept getting more and more irritated but I said nothing. I never do. Do my boundaries exist if I don't voice them? Can people not see my body, the mass of it, as one very big boundary? Do they not know how much effort went into this? Because I am not a touchy-feely person, I always feel this light shock, this surprise, really, when my skin comes into contact with another person's skin. Sometimes that shock is pleasant, like Oh, here is my body in the world. Sometimes, it is not. I never know which it will be.”

RespectBoundariesIntimacyPersonal SpaceHugging
Book:Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
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“The body is not a fortress, no matter what we may do to make it such. This may be one of life's greatest frustrations, or is it humiliations? I spend a lot of time thinking about bodies and boundaries and how people seem hell-bent on ignoring those boundaries at all costs. I am not a hugger. I never have been and I never will be. I hug my friends, and do so happily, but I am sparing with such affections. A hug means something to me; it is an act of profound intimacy, so I try not to get too promiscuous with it. Also, I find it awkward, opening myself up, allowing people to touch, to breach my fortress. When I tell strangers I am not a hugger, some take this as a challenge, like they can hug me into submission, like they can will my aversion to hugs away by the strength of their arms. Oftentimes, they will draw me into their body, saying something condescending like, "See, it isn't that bad." I think, I never thought it was, and I stand there, my arms limply by my sides, probably grimacing, but still, they don't get the message that I am not a willing participant in this embrace. The fortress hath been breached.”

RespectBoundariesIntimacyPersonal SpaceHugging
Book:Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
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“We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgment rather than accusation. We need to be able to argue beyond the threat of privilege. We need to stop playing Privilege or Oppression Olympics because we’ll never get anywhere until we find more effective ways of talking through difference. We should be able to say, “This is my truth,” and have that truth stand without a hundred clamoring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot coexist. Because at some point, doesn’t privilege become beside the point?”

EmpathyPrivilegeUnderstanding Oneself And Others
Book:Bad Feminist
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“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 be non-confrontational, agreeable, solicitous, deferential, demure, nurturing, to be tuned in to others, and to shrink and shut up.”

AssaultHarassmentRape CultureRape Survivor
Book:Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture
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“We don’t necessarily know how to hear stories about any kind of violence, because it is hard to accept that violence is as simple as it is complicated, that you can love someone who hurts you, that you can stay with someone who hurts you, that you can be hurt by someone who loves you, that you can be hurt by a complete stranger, that you can be hurt in so many terrible, intimate ways.”

ViolenceAbuseAssaultDomestic ViolenceRapeDomestic Abuse
Book:Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
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“I resisted feminism in my late teens and my twenties because i worried that feminism wouldn't allow me to be the mess of a woman i knew myself to be. But then i began to learn more about feminism. i learnt to separate feminism from Feminism or Feminists or the idea of an Essential Feminism - one true feminism to dominate all of womankind.”

FeminismFeministFeminist QuotesFeminist AuthorsFeminist LiteratureRoxane GayFeminist BooksBad Feminist
Book:Bad Feminist
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“I was too smart and that made people uncomfortable--most folks where we've lived our whole lives don't trust too much intelligence in a woman. There is also the problem of my eyes--they don't hide anything. If I don't care for a person, my eyes make it plain. I don't care for most. Folks are generally comfortable with the small lies they tell each other. They don't know what to do with someone like me, who mostly doesn't bother with small lies.”

WomenIntelligenceEyesSmall Towns
Book:Difficult Women
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