Not That Bad Quotes

“In our no-pain-no-gain dogma, the cost of something is often mistaken for its value.”
― Elissa Bassist, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“The cost of something is often mistaken for its value.”
― Elissa Bassist, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“But “am” doesn’t seem right either. To “be” a body suggests that you are only a body. You are meat and some blood. You are hard bones and flexing cartilage. You are tangled veins and skin. Is that all, though?”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“THE TRUTH NO ONE TOLD YOU IS THAT, IN ORDER FOR A good girl to survive, she must make some things disappear. You know because you used to be one of the good girls; you used to know how to forget. But the truth you’re trying to tell yourself now is that you don’t need to be “good,” not anymore. You need to be seen, and in order to be seen, you need to let yourself remember.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Unmoored and in flight, the refugee is vulnerable to every king of harm- from homelessness to fraud- but sexual violence is the most intimate and most public act of brutalization, and it erupts wherever laws and social norms are unraveled. As transit bodies drift in search of sanctuary, gendered violence can buttress a social taxonomy of dominance and oppression, demarcating the tapeable and those with the power to rape, siphoning spheres of male and female, captors and prisoners.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“The idea of a secret that will be revealed always results in one of two scenarios: death and destruction, or self-discovery and recovery beyond our wildest dreams of unification. And in the greatest of sagas, both at the same time.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I survived.

Raped children are supposed to die. What would the culture of the individual white cisgender male straight genius do without us? We are the predicate of their sentences, material for their dispassionate dissections.

We are supposed to die prettily and vacantly so our rage doesn’t tear down all their certificates and awards and case files, trash their analysis and ram their face in the privilege that allows them to side with our abusers in silencing and killing us.

“He has sometimes likened his style of writing to that of a medic performing a post-mortem on a raped child-whose job is to analyze the injuries, not to give vent to the rage that is felt.”
- Susie Mackenzie on J.G. Ballard,
Guardian, Sept. 6th, 2003

If Ballard’s is the model for the experimental, political novel, how is the (un)dead raped child supposed to write, even if she survives?”
― So Mayer, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Because in Atlas Shrugged, alpha male Francisco d’Anconia tells railroad company VP Dagny Taggart that she sounds happy in her new relationship: “‘But, you see, the measure of the hell you’re able to endure is the measure of your love.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Already that semester, the university had been steeped in controversy after students at a freshman week welcome event had been reported chanting: “We like ’em young! Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for go to jail.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“He has sometimes likened his style of writing to that of a medic performing a post-mortem on a raped child—whose job is to analyse the injuries, not to give vent to the rage that is felt.” —SUSIE MACKENZIE ON J. G. BALLARD, GUARDIAN,”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I didn’t say anything on social media, though relatives tried to tag me in supportive status updates, which I did my best to untag myself from. I didn’t want to be a part of their mourning. I didn’t want to be involved in someone else’s grief when I knew so little about how to deal with my own.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“My brother once called me a hard person. I think he meant that I am a person who does not forgive. This is true. I find it difficult to forgive people who have done harm to me. I am this way out of necessity, because if I do not remember the harm done to me, then no one will, and the boy that I was will have no one to look out for him.”
― Brandon Taylor, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Then they will revise backward. They will take every opinion they’ve ever heard from you, every personality trait, every action, and recast them in light of what you told them.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“These are little bits of things that happened, or things you think about. They’re light on tension, you know that. There’s no real peril. There’s no resolution. Still, they stick with you. You think about them even after they’re over, sometimes for a long time. Sometimes for a very long time. That’s how you know they’re important somehow. It’s why you can recall the smell of that party, even many years after the smell of your grandfather’s cologne has faded from your memory.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“They were so desperate to project the image of the respectable, righteous, picture-perfect Black Family to the world that they were willing to let the women and girls in those pictures suffer.”
― Sharisse Tracey, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I still carry the weight of being a rape survivor, and of the demand that I forgive and forget to uphold the myth of the perfect black family. I carry the weight handed to me by the Black moral majority, who ignored my father's crimes and who knows how many other men's, who tried to buy off a terrified thirteen year old with a one-day trip to an amusement park. They were so desperate to project the image of the respectable, righteous, picture-perfect Black family to the world that they were willing to let women and girls in the picture suffer.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“A good therapist knows you have to live in the house while you remodel.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“O my friend searching for an absurdity necessary to train the self to be tolerant . . . do not reconcile with anything except for this obscure reason. Do not regret a war that ripened you just as August ripens pomegranates on the slopes of stolen mountains.” —MAHMOUD DARWISH”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I also have to live with being the type of woman who might—or probably always will—feel guilty that she never told this man she’s trans.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“The survivor who was raped at knifepoint feels guilty she has taken up the space of a survivor who was raped at gunpoint. Everyone believes there is suffering worse than her own, that they should be strong enough to cope without me.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“She had learned, somewhere in the interim, to do more than simply reveal what had happened to her; she had learned to tell the story of it so that it didn’t become her only story.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I said yes because I’m sick of using my past as a crutch to explain the present.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Because I can’t understand a sexual identity that doesn’t involve rage or terror or power.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I said yes. It’s always seemed easier.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“My compassion for victims of sexual violence is something that I cannot control. It spills out of me like an instinct rather than a choice.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Unmoored and in flight, the refugee is vulnerable to every kind of harm—from homelessness to fraud—but sexual violence is the most intimate and most public act of brutalization, and it erupts wherever laws and social norms are unraveled.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“we are mired in a circuitous and damning dialogue, so powerful that it invalidates our experiences, our traumas, our truths—a dialogue so powerful that we begin to doubt whether our experience was ever there at all.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I have spent years in therapy, decades in yoga, and months in meditation to grow and heal and understand and yet, despite everything, when I write about that night I still worry if my story is believable.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“When you grow older, you’ll tell her, you will not get over what happened, but you will reach the other side of it.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Your husband is the best human you know.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture