01c. 1974 ADIn 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.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
02c. 1974 ADIf people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
03c. 1974 ADI 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.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
04c. 1974 ADDeath 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.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
05c. 1974 ADThe 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.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
06c. 1974 ADOne of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. I've struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I'm 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.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
07c. 1974 ADNostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
08c. 1974 ADAll 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.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
09c. 1974 ADWhenever 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.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
10c. 1974 ADFor a moment, Milly couldn't 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.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
12c. 1974 ADAll too often, when we see injustices, both great and small, we think, That's 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.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
13c. 1974 ADWe 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.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
14c. 1974 ADI try to learn better, do better. I have no idea how I got to be the one at the front of the classroom, the one who gets to be in charge of things. Most of the time, I feel like the kid who gets to sit at the adult table for the first time at Thanksgiving. I'm not sure which fork to use. My feet can't reach the floor.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
15c. 1974 ADRacism doesn’t care about respectability, wealth, education, or statusRoxane Gay / quote ↗
16c. 1974 ADIn graduate school, early on, I once overheard a classmate talking in her office as I walked by. She didn't know I was there. She was gossiping about me to a group of our classmates & said I was the affirmative-action student...Rationally, I know it was absurd, but hearing how she & maybe others saw me hurt real bad...I stopped joking about being a slacker. I tripled the number of projects I was involved with. I was excellent most of the time. I fell short some of the time. I made sure I got good grades. I made sure my comprehensive exams were solid. I wrote conference proposals & had them accepted. I published. I designed an overly ambitious research project for my dissertation that kind of made me want to die. No matter what I did, I heard that girl, that girl who had accomplished a fraction of a fraction of what I had, telling a group of our peers I was the one who did not deserve to be in our program.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
17c. 1974 ADThere is no collective slavery revenge fantasy among black people, but I am certain, if there were one, it would not be about white people, not at all.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
18c. 1974 ADI am quite content to be in my thirties, and nothing affirms that more than being around people in their late teens and early twenties.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
19c. 1974 ADI was always a good girl. I was a straight-A student, top of my class. I did as I was told. I was polite to my elders. I was good to my siblings. I went to church. It was very easy to hide how very bad I was becoming from my family, from everyone. Being good is the best way to be bad.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
20c. 1974 ADI don’t put that pressure on myself (to write every day), but I do tend to write every day. It’s not pressure—it’s pressure release.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
21c. 1974 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
22c. 1974 ADHuman endurance fascinates me, probably too much because more often than not, I think of life in terms of enduring instead of living.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
23c. 1974 ADWe must stop pointing to the exceptions—these bright shining stars who transcend circumstance. We must look to how we can best support the least among us, not spend all our time blindly revering and trying to mimic the greatest without demanding systemic change.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
24c. 1974 ADI'm tired of feeling like I should be grateful when popular culture deigns to acknowledge the experiences of people who are not white, middle class or wealthy, and heterosexual.Roxane Gay / quote ↗
