Difficult Women Quotes

“She was smart enough to want more but tired enough to accept the way things were.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“What a Crazy Woman Thinks About While Walking Down the Street She tries to walk not too fast and not too slow. She doesn’t want to attract any attention. She pretends she doesn’t hear the whistles and catcalls and lewd comments. Sometimes she forgets and leaves her house in a skirt or a tank top because it’s a warm day and she wants to feel warm air on her bare skin. Before long, she remembers. She keeps her keys in her hand, three of them held between her fingers, like a dull claw. She makes eye contact only when necessary and if a man should catch her eye, she juts her chin forward, makes sure the line of her jaw is strong. When she leaves work or the bar late, she calls a car service and when the car pulls up to her building, she quickly scans the street to make sure it’s safe to walk the short distance from the curb to the door. She once told a boyfriend about these considerations and he said, “You are completely out of your mind.” She told a new friend at work and she said, “Honey, you’re not crazy. You’re a woman.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“For difficult women, who should be celebrated for their very nature”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“My husband's family is religious. His relatives believe in God. Their God is angry and unkind because they made him in their image.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“We were young once and then we weren’t.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“People in town didn't understand Anna and largely believed her to be godless, a designation she rather enjoyed because she understood that in their community, to be godless was to have a mind of one's own.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“Silence is the cruelest of cruelties.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“Their God is angry and unkind because they made him in their image.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“You are the joy in my life. I am a mess but I will be the joy in yours … When you touch me, you feel through me, through the ugliness beneath my skin, you make me feel, you hold me together, you push my skin back into its proper place. When you see me next, I will be wearing your ring on my left finger. I will say yes. You will hear me.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“Late at night, when they lay together, as much of their bodies touching as possible, Anna and Parker had the conversations they could have only with each other. They tried to remember the before, when they were children and there was only one place to call home, one country, the flag billowing on windy days in front of homes up and down every street—bands of red and white, fifty stars, one nation, indivisible until it wasn’t, how quickly it all came apart.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“A woman who cleaned their homes had such a naturally fine body while they stretched themselves taut with the finest surgeons in South Florida and didn't look half as good. It wasn't fair. Money was supposed to make things fair.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“He's the kind of man who gets ideas but is largely unable to follow through on those ideas.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“I get so scared but the world somehow makes sense there. Being with you feels like that.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“There’s a lot to love about breaking things. Everyone”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“She didn't care if he was telling the truth. Milly felt nothing but she was very good at making men think otherwise. Sometimes, she nearly convinced herself.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“Milly is not, in fact, ugly, but she might as well be. She has a pretty face, which is the same thing as ugly when a woman is fat. In the complex calculus between men and women, Milly understands that fat is always ugly and that ugly and skinny makes a woman eminently more desirable than fat and any combination such as beautiful, charming, intelligent, or kind. Milly is all those things. She knows it doesn't matter.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“She never looked away. What a Crazy Woman Thinks About While Walking Down the Street She tries to walk not too fast and not too slow. She doesn’t want to attract any attention. She pretends she doesn’t hear the whistles and catcalls and lewd comments. Sometimes she forgets and leaves her house in a skirt or a tank top because it’s a warm day and she wants to feel warm air on her bare skin. Before long, she remembers. She keeps her keys in her hand, three of them held between her fingers, like a dull claw. She makes eye contact only when necessary and if a man should catch her eye, she juts her chin forward, makes sure the line of her jaw is strong. When she leaves work or the bar late, she calls a car service and when the car pulls up to her building, she quickly scans the street to make sure it’s safe to walk the short distance from the curb to the door.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“Something wet and heavy caught in my throat. "Why him?" "I'd be no good to a really good man and Darryl isn't really a bad man."
I knew exactly what she meant.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“Words cannot fill the faithless with faith.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“It is hard to write about happy things when you can never escape the kind of cold that sinks into your bones and stays there. I am in Siberia, I decide. I am comforted by thoughts of exile, cold solace, meditation, and inspiration born of emotional deprivation. It is all very dramatic.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“Marcy never knew what to say during these moments, but she smiled politely because she understood these people and how they existed only in relation to those around them.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“Honey, you’re not crazy. You’re a woman.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“She said, 'There's no mystery to keeping a man.' She dabbed at my lipstick with a tissue she had been holding, folded, in the palm of her hand. She said, 'You do whatever sick thing he wants, when he wants, and you'll never have a problem.' That was the only advice she has ever given me. She and my father divorced when I was nine.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“We were young once.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“For 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, Difficult Women

“When I wake up, my mouth is thick and sour. I groan and sit up, and hit my head against something unfamiliar. I wince. Everything in my head feels loose, lost.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“Darryl decided to move to Nevada, better prospects he said, and told Carolina she was his wife, had to go with him.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“Milly felt nothing but she was very good at making men think otherwise. Sometimes she nearly convinced herself.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“She tries to walk not too fast and not too slow. She doesn't want to attract any attention. She pretends she doesn't hear the whistles and catcalls and lewd comments. Sometimes she forgets and leaves her house in a skirt or a tank top because it's a warm day and she wants to feel warm air on her bare skin. Before long, she remembers. She keeps her keys in her hand, three of them held between her fingers, like a dull claw. She makes eye contact only when necessary and if a man should catch her eye, she juts her chin forward, makes sure the line of her jaw is strong. When she leaves work or the bar late, she calls a car service and when the car pulls up to her building, she quickly scans the street to make sure it's safe to walk the short distance from the curb to the door. She once told a boyfriend about these considerations and he said, 'You are completely out of your mind.' She told a new friend at work and she said, 'Honey you're not crazy. You're a woman.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women