I will keep writing about these intersections as a writer and a teacher, as a black woman, as a bad feminist, until I no longer feel like what I want is impossible. I no longer want to believe that these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them.

— Roxane Gay

I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.

— Roxane Gay

... just one more reminder that the rules are always different for girls, no matter who they are and no matter what they do.

— Roxane Gay

Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning. This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone. We all have history. You can think you're over your history. You can think the past is the past. And then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.

— Roxane Gay

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

— Roxane Gay

Long walks on the beach are the supposed holy grail of a romantic evening. The beach becomes a kind of utopia - the place where all our dreams come true.

— Roxane Gay

Love your friends' kids even if you don't want or like children. Just do it.

— Roxane Gay

Many comedians are very proud of themselves for saying the things others are supposedly afraid to say. They are at the forefront of this culture of entitlement where we get to do anything, think anything, and say anything.

— Roxane Gay

More troubling than this oddly timed debate about birth control is the vehemence with which women need to justify or explain why they take birth control—health reasons, to regulate periods, you know, as if there's anything wrong with taking birth control simply because you want to have sex without that sex resulting in pregnancy.

— Roxane Gay

Nostalgia 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