602 Quotes by Roxane Gay

I see a lot of 'look to your black friends' type posts. Your black friends already have jobs. They probably don’t want to also educate you on racism yet again. Books, however, are an excellent resource. Read! Audre Lorde. James Baldwin. Toni Morrison. Isabel Wilkerson. Etc.(twitter, june 2, 2020)

I step away as I notice a group of young, angry men walking toward us. I doubt that there is any particular reason for their anger. It is the anger that most men feel these days; they are angry about their impotence and their desires and their reality. It is an anger we all feel. But it is an anger only men can freely express.

Like many writers, I lived inside of books as a child.

I very much like men. They're interesting to me, and I mostly wish they would be better about how they treat women so I wouldn't have to call them out so often.

This is where we should start focusing this conversation: how men (as readers, critics, and editors) can start to bear the responsibility for becoming better, broader readers.

Despite what people think based on my opinion writing, I very much like men. They're interesting to me, and I mostly wish they would be better about how they treat women so I wouldn't have to call them out so often.

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.

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.

Often in literary criticism, writers are told that a character isn't likable, as if a character's likability is directly proportional to the quality of a novel's writing.