Not That Bad Quotes

“understand why you kept your secret for so long. You start to understand why it isn’t safe for some women and men to ever share their secrets: Their families will implode, their livelihoods are at stake, their marriages may end. This you know: The truth may set you free, but the truth will also cost you.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Sometimes people tell me that something bad happened to me, but I am brave and strong. I don’t want to be told that I am brave or strong. I am not right just because he was wrong. I don’t want to be made noble. I want someone willing to watch me thrash and crumple because that, too, is the truth, and it needs a witness.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“My language is so impercise. I am thrashing in what I can't tell you.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I imagine that there are ways in which our bodies never really stop being our mothers' bodies. In the bath, I trace my fingers along the lines of myself like a person following a river to its source. When I laugh like her or when I'm mean like her or when I go cold and distant like her, I can feel her lingering, ready to claim what is hers and has always been hers.”
― Brandon Taylor, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I love my quiet. I hate how, in the after, my quiet has become silence. The room in my chest that was sky-lit has become a sealed and padded cell.
Your love brought me back to my quiet. I needed a new language. I needed a new story--one where I don't have to remember the beginning and don't know the end.”
― Claire Schwartz, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Judith Butler says that we suffer from out condition of addressability. My body feels like my condition, and everything feels like an address.”
― Claire Schwartz, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“You'll write a letter to that good girl who is still stowed away inside you. When you grow older, you'll tell her, you will not get over what happened, but you will reach the other side of it. You will keep it in your back pocket rather than live with it roped around your neck.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Anger was the only thing that made me strong enough to leave the only home I knew. I held onto it and nurtured it every night, reciting my parent's litany of offenses over and over into the dark of my room. I needed to leave. I needed my anger to help me.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“The Life Ruiner alone didn't ruin me. The world that made him did - the place that continues to manufacture replicas of him and continues to create the circumstances in which he and his replicas thrive. What is there to do about that?”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“But I am not strong, and honestly? I resent having to face up to it. I resent having to be a survivor.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I am short, round, wear glasses, didn't get my chipped front teeth fixed until a couple of years ago because I didn't know how to let go of what my life had been, didn't know that I deserved that.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Buying into the notion of "not that bad" made me incredibly hard on myself for not "getting over it" fast enough as the years passed and I was still carrying so much hurt.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“The line between just being a girl on a date and being a “tease” never even existed.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“RAPE WAS WHERE MY REBELLION STARTED. HIS SMALL SENSE that—small as I was, an infant—I needed to be controlled was my hint that I had power that had to be curtailed. That I was alive enough to be annihilated. That my survival was a threat that needed to be contained.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Once or twice in my life, I swear to you, I’ve done things other than be a body available for men to enjoy or reject. But I know I have no right to complain. I am lucky. I’ve been allowed one more day as a woman on this earth, relatively unviolated.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“He doesn’t want a conversation. He’s not shouting at you as a method of engagement; he’s just testing something out. He needs to fumble around for his power in the dark, like a totem he carries in his pocket. He wants to make sure it’s still there.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture