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People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things.

Roxane Gay

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Roxane Gay
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: October 15
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Scrabble Player
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Disown
Regularly
Terrible
Humanity
Things
Time
People
Disavow

More quotes by Roxane Gay

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Most of my favorite tweets go completely ignored but most of my favorite tweets are probably really lame or inside jokes between me and my [redacted]. See what I did there?
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I love Twitter. It doesn't keep me from writing and I think it's a really convenient scapegoat when the truth is that the real issue is self-control. I am totally fine admitting i have none. I'm not going to blame Twitter for affecting my writing. And also, Twitter doesn't affect my writing.
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I am human. I am messy. I'm not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I'm right. I am just trying - trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.
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I write for myself, first and foremost and I also write for people, mostly women, who just want to be seen and heard and all too often aren't.
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I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.
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Most of the time, writing is a lot of fun, and not a small amount of self-medication.
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You have to be consistent. You have to be yourself. You have to be committed to what you're doing. You have to not be afraid to be ambitious.
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I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, 'You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person.' This caricature is how feminists have been warped by the people who fear feminism most, the same people who have the most to lose when feminism succeeds.
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Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.
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I'm fat positive, in that I don't see fat as a bad thing. But what I do see as a bad thing is how I'm treated. I can have the most positive outlook in the world, but that is not going to change how hecklers and people walking down the street are yelling at me.
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Feminism is definitely a part of everything I do.
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My tweeting is cool and calm unless I am riled up about something and then I just surrender to the fury of my fingers.
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I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.
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The other day, I saw a blog post where a woman wrote about why she was unfollowing me and that made me feel incredibly self-conscious and embarrassed about my tweets. I also feel more exposed now that I've become a more visible writer but then I try to get over all that and just use Twitter the way I want.
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Truth can hurt so very much.
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When I write on Twitter, I do other things: I'm working, grading, or reading, and I'm procrastinating, and I'll pop on Twitter and be like, Hey, what's up? Yogurt's delicious.
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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.
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If I cannot rest and relax, all the work I do is for naught.
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Nemeses aren't born. They are made.
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I probably write the same story a hundred different ways. I suppose right now I am looking for the 101st different way to write that same story. And the 102nd, and 103rd and 111th and 133rd.
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