Roxane Gay Hunger Quotes

What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?

There is an anxiety in being yourself, though. There is the haunting question of "What if?" always lingering. What if who I am will never be enough? What if I will never be right enough for someone?

I am stronger than I am broken.

It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth.

I am not promiscuous with my warmth, but when I share it, my warmth can be as hot as the sun.

My father believes hunger is in the mind. I know differently. I know that hunger is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul.

I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. She is still small and scared and ashamed, and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear.

The story of my life is wanting, hungering, for what I cannot have or, perhaps, wanting what I dare not allow myself to have.

I am weary of all our sad stories—not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, that there are so many.

I often say that reading and writing saved my life. I mean that quite literally.

As a woman, as a fat woman, I am not supposed to take up space. And yet, as a feminist, I am encouraged to believe I can take up space. I live in a contradictory space where I should try to take up space but not too much of it, and not in the wrong way, where the wrong way is any way where my body is concerned.

This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not.

The bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

I am nowhere near as brave as people believe me to be. As a writer, armed with words, I can do anything, but when I have to take my body out into the world, courage fails me.

I reserve my most elaborate delusions and disappointments for myself.

The medical community is not particularly interested in taking the pain of women seriously.

I don’t want them, or anyone, to think I am nothing more than the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

In yet another commercial, Oprah somberly says, “Inside every overweight woman is a woman she knows she can be.” This is a popular notion, the idea that the fat among us are carrying a thin woman inside. Each time I see this particular commercial, I think, I ate that thin woman and she was delicious but unsatisfying. And then I think about how fucked up it is to promote this idea that our truest selves are thin women hiding in our fat bodies like imposters, usurpers, illegitimates.

Part of the reason relationships and friendships can be so difficult for me is because there is a part of me that thinks I have to get things just right. I have to say the right things and do the right things or I won’t be liked or loved anymore.

When I am walking down the street, men lean out of their car windows and shout vulgar things at me about my body, how they see it, and how it upsets them that I am not catering to their gaze and their preferences and desires. I try not to take these men seriously because what they are really saying is, “I am not attracted to you. I do not want to fuck you, and this confuses my understanding of my masculinity, entitlement, and place in this world.” It is not my job to please them with my body.

I do not suffer from ignorance where exercise is related. I suffer from inertia.

So many years past being raped, I tell myself what happened is “in the past.” This is only partly true. In too many ways, the past is still with me. The past is written on my body. I carry it every single day. The past sometimes feels like it might kill me. It is a very heavy burden.

You are your body, nothing more, and your body should damn well become less.

This is the reality of living in my body: I am trapped in a cage. The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far. It

We don’t necessarily know how to hear stories about any kind of violence, because it is hard to accept that violence is as simple as it is complicated, that you can love someone who hurts you, that you can stay with someone who hurts you, that you can be hurt by someone who loves you, that you can be hurt by a complete stranger, that you can be hurt in so many terrible, intimate ways.

I was broken and then I broke some more, and I am not yet healed but I have started believing I will be.

What I know and what I feel are two very different things.

I have tried to make peace with this body. I have tried to love or at least tolerate this body in a world that displays nothing but contempt for it.

I was cold, I’ve been told. I often write stories about women who are perceived as cold and resent that perception. I write these women because I know what it’s like to have so much warmth roiling beneath the skin’s surface, ready to be found. I am not cold. I wasn’t ever cold. My warmth was hidden far away from anything that could bring hurt because I knew I didn’t have the inner scaffolding to endure any more hurt in those protected places.

Fat daughters and their thin mothers have especially complicated relationships.

This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided.

Why do we view the boundaries people create for themselves as challenges? Why do we see someone setting a limit and then try to push?

I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.

This is what most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.

Feeling comfortable in my body isn't entirely about beauty standards. It is not entirely about ideals. It's about how I feel in my skin and bones, from one day to the next.

To be clear, the fat acceptance movement is important, affirming, and profoundly necessary, but I also believe that part of fat acceptance is accepting that some of us struggle with body image and haven’t reached a place of peace and unconditional self-acceptance.

Doctors are supposed to first do no harm, but when it comes to fat bodies, most doctors seem fundamentally incapable of heeding their oath.

I am determined to be more than my body - what my body has endured, what my body has become.

Black woman are rarely allowed their femininity.

I wish I did not see my body as something for which I should apologize or provide explanation.

For so long, I gave in to my self-loathing. I refused to allow myself the simple pleasure of accepting who I am and how I live and love and think and see the world. But then, I got older and I cared less about what other people think.

With age comes self-awareness, or something that looks like self-awareness, and so I try to be on the lookout for patterns of behavior, choices I’m making where I’m trying too hard, giving too much, reaching too intently for being right when right is what someone else wants me to be. It’s scary, though, trying to be yourself and hoping yourself is enough. It’s scary believing that you, as you are, could never be enough.

I was marked after that. Men could smell it on me, that I had lost my body, that they could avail themselves of my body, that I wouldn’t say no because I knew my no did not matter. They smelled it on me and took advantage, every chance they got.

I deny myself gentler kinds of affection—to touch or be kindly touched—as if that is a pleasure a body like mine does not deserve.

That was something of a revelation to me, that a young man could be kind.

Fat shaming is real, constant, and rather pointed. There are a shocking number of people who believe they can simply torment fat people into weight loss and disciplining their bodies or disappearing their bodies from the public sphere. They believe they are medical experts, listing a litany of health problems associated with fatness as personal affronts. These tormentors bind themselves in righteousness when they point out the obvious—that our bodies are unruly, defiant, fat. It’s a strange civic-minded cruelty. When people try to shame me for being fat, I feel rage. I get stubborn. I want to make myself fatter to spite the shamers, even though the only person I would really be spiting is myself.

I am not cold. I wasn’t ever cold. My warmth was hidden far away from anything that could bring hurt because I knew I didn’t have the inner scaffolding to endure any more hurt in those protected places.

The body is not a fortress, no matter what we may do to make it such.

Do my boundaries exist if I don’t voice them?

It was a moment when I understood that all of us have to be more considerate of the realities of the bodies of others.

It's scary believing that you, as you are, could ever be enough.

I loved the escape of writing those stories, of imagining lives that were different from my own. I had a ferocious imagination. I was a daydreamer and I resented being pulled out of my daydreams to deal with the business of living. In my stories, I could write myself the friends I did not have. I could make so many things possible that I did not dare imagine for myself. I could be brave. I could be smart. I could be funny. I could be everything I ever wanted. When I wrote, it was so easy to be happy.

I know what it means to hunger without being hungry. My father believes hunger is in the mind. I know differently. I know that hunger is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul.

I am not good at romantic interactions that aren’t furtive and kind of sleazy. I don’t know how to ask someone on a date. I don’t know how to gauge the potential interest of other human beings. I don’t know how to trust people who do express interest in me. I am not the girl who “gets the date” in these circumstances, or that’s what I cannot help but tell myself. I am always paralyzed by self-doubt and mistrust.

If I must share my story, I want to do so on my terms, without the attention that inevitably follows. I do not want pity or appreciation or advice. I am not brave or heroic. I am not strong. I am not special. I am one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced. I am a victim who survived. It could have been worse, so much worse. That’s

Because I read so much, I was a romantic in my heart of hearts, but my desire to be part of a romantic story was a very intellectual, detached one. I liked the idea of a boy asking me out, taking me on a date, kissing me, but I did not want to actually be alone with a boy, because a boy could hurt me.

Intellectually, I do not equate thinness with happiness. I could wake up thin tomorrow and I would still carry the same baggage I have been hauling around for almost thirty years. I would still bear the scar tissue of many of those years as a fat person in a cruel world.

I had (and have?) this void, this cavern of loneliness inside me that I have spent my whole life trying to fill. I was willing to do most anything if that boy would ease my loneliness, I wanted to feel like he and I belonged to each other, but each time we were together and then after, I felt quite the opposite. And still, I was drawn to him.

It took me a long time, but I prefer “victim” to “survivor” now. I don’t want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don’t want to pretend I’m on some triumphant, uplifting journey. I don’t want to pretend that everything is okay. I’m living with what happened, moving forward without forgetting, moving forward without pretending I am unscarred. This

I am not the same scared girl that I was. I have let the right ones in.

I will never forgive the boys who raped me and I am a thousand percent comfortable with that because forgiving them will not free me from anything. I

I (want to) believe my worth as a human being does not reside in my size or appearance

He has told me, “I am only telling you what no one else will,” but of course, he is telling me what the world is always telling me, everywhere I go.

I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. She is still small and scared and ashamed, an

I am hyperconscious of how I take up space and I resent having to be this way, so when people around me aren't mindful of how they take up space, I feel pure rage . . . The ease with which they take up space feels spiteful and personal.

I am thinking about testimony I’ve heard from other women over the years—women sharing their truths, daring to use their voices to say, “This is what happened to me. This is how I have been wronged.” I’ve been thinking about how so much testimony is demanded of women, and still, there are those who doubt our stories.

I’ve been that girl, too big for the clothes in the store, just trying to find something, anything, that fits, while also dealing with the commentary of someone else who means well but can’t help but make pointed, insensitive comments. To be that girl in a clothing store is to be the loneliest girl in the world. I

I learned how to live in my head, where I could ignore the world that refused to accept me,

This is to say, I know what it means to hunger without being hungry.

Sometimes we try to convince ourselves of things that are not true, reframing the past to better explain the present.

With my tattoos, I get to say, these are choices I make for my body, with full-throated consent. This is how I mark myself. This is how I take my body back.

What a privilege it is to be able to say it’s hard to hear someone’s story.

Living in my body has expanded my empathy for other people and the truths of their bodies.

Because I am not a touchy-feely person, I always feel this light shock, this surprise, really, when my skin comes into contact with another person’s skin. Sometimes that shock is pleasant, like Oh, here is my body in the world. Sometimes, it is not. I never know which it will be.

Things often go wrong and cooking can be messy, but the act of creating something from disparate ingredients still remains satisfying. Cooking reminds me that I am capable of taking care of myself and worthy of taking care of and nourishing myself.

I was never going to be good enough, but I tried so hard. I tried to make myself better. I tried to make myself acceptable to someone who would never find me acceptable but kept me around for reasons I cannot begin to make sense of. I stayed because they confirmed every terrible thing I already knew about myself. I stayed because I thought no one else would possibly tolerate someone as worthless as me. I stayed through infidelity and disrespect. I stayed until they no longer wanted me around.

I am self-conscious beyond measure. I am intensely and constantly preoccupied with my body in the world because I know what people think and what they see when they look at me. I know that I am breaking the unspoken rules of what a woman should look like. I

Celebrities understand the economy of thinness, and most of them are willing to participate in that economy, taking to social media, where they pose for selfies with their cheeks sucked in to make themselves appear even gaunter. The less space they take up, the more they matter.

Regardless of what you do, your body is the subject of public discourse with family, friends, and strangers alike. Your body is subject to commentary when you gain weight, lose weight, or maintain your unacceptable weight. People are quick to offer you statistics and information about the dangers of obesity, as if you are not only fat but also incredibly stupid, unaware, delusional about the realities of your body and a world that is vigorously inhospitable to that body. This commentary is often couched as concern, as people only having your best interests at heart. They forget that you are a person. You are your body, nothing more, and your body should damn well become less.

My body is a cage. My body is a cage of my own making. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years.

People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not.

I also don’t think there’s any shame in saying that when I was raped, I became a victim, and to this day, while I am also many other things, I am still a victim.

For many, many years to come, I would keep telling myself that the barest minimum of acknowledgment from lovers was enough.

The story of my life is wanting, hungering, for what I cannot have or, perhaps, wanting what I dare not allow myself to have. Many

The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far.

My body is a cage, but this is my cage and there are moments where I take pride in it.

It’s scary, though, trying to be yourself and hoping yourself is enough. It’s scary believing that you, as you are, could ever be enough.

Family is powerful, no matter what. We’re always tied together with our eyes and our lips and our blood and our bloody hearts.

Or they say, “I know you don't like hugs, but I'm going to hug you anyway,” and I have to dodge their incoming bodies as politely as I can. Why do we view the boundaries people create for themselves as challenges? Why do we see someone setting a limit and then try to push?

During my twenties, my personal life was the hottest mess. The hottest. It will never be that messy again because I’ve grown up and I finally give enough of a damn about myself to avoid burning myself in that kind of fire. I’m still a mess, but I’m a different kind of mess now. I can generally identify what the mess is and where it’s coming from.

During a tattoo, pain is constant and sometimes it lasts hours, but it doesn’t necessarily register the same way pain normally does. I am not to be trusted on this. I do not register pain as most people do, which is to say, my tolerance is high. It is probably too high. But the pain of a tattoo is something to which you have to surrender because once you’ve started, you cannot really go back or you’ll be left with something not only permanent but unfinished. I enjoy the irrevocability of that circumstance. You have to allow yourself this pain. You have chosen this suffering, and at the end of it, your body will be different. Maybe your body will feel more like yours.

Years ago, I told myself that one day I would stop feeling this quiet but abiding rage about the things I have been through at the hands of others. I would wake up and there would be no flashbacks. I wouldn't wake up and think about my histories of violence. I wouldn't smell the yeasty aroma of beer and for a second, for several minutes, for hours, forget where I was. And on and on and on. That day never came, or it hasn't come, and I am no longer waiting for it. A different day has come, though. I flinch less and less when I am touched. I don't always see gentleness as the calm before the storm because, more often than not, I can trust that no storm is coming. I harbor less hatred toward myself. I try to forgive myself for my trespasses.

There is always a moment when I am losing weight when I feel better in my body. I breathe easier. I move better. I feel myself getting smaller and stronger. My clothes fall over my body the way they should and then they start to get baggy. I get terrified. I start to worry about my body becoming more vulnerable as it grows smaller. I start to imagine all the ways I could be hurt. I start to remember all the ways I have been hurt.

It took a long time, but I prefer 'victim' to 'survivor' now. I don't want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don't want to pretend I'm on some triumphant, uplifting journey. I don't want to pretend that everything is okay. I'm living with what happened, moving forward without forgetting, moving forward without pretending I am unscarred.

My friendships, and I use that term loosely, were fleeting and fragile and often painful, with people who generally wanted something from me and were gone as soon as they got that something. I was so lonely I was willing to tolerate these relationships. The faint resemblance of human connection was enough. It had to be enough even though it wasn’t.

I look at some of my worst relationships and think, At least they didn’t hit me. I work from a place of gratitude for the bare minimum. Since then I’ve never been in a relationship where I’ve had to hide nonconsensual bruises. I’ve never feared for my life. I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t walk away. Does this make me a lucky girl? Given the stories I’ve heard from other women, yes, it does make me a lucky girl. This is not how we should measure luck.

Why do we view the boundaries people create for themselves as challenges? Why do we see someone setting a limit and then try to push? Once, I was at a restaurant with a large group of people and the waitress kept touching me. It was really fucking annoying because I don't want to be touched like that unless we are in a sexual relationship. Every time she passed by, she would rub my shoulders or run her hand down my arm and I kept getting more and more irritated but I said nothing. I never do. Do my boundaries exist if I don't voice them? Can people not see my body, the mass of it, as one very big boundary? Do they not know how much effort went into this? Because I am not a touchy-feely person, I always feel this light shock, this surprise, really, when my skin comes into contact with another person's skin. Sometimes that shock is pleasant, like Oh, here is my body in the world. Sometimes, it is not. I never know which it will be.

Writing this book is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. To lay myself so vulnerable has not been an easy thing. To face myself and what living in my body has been like has not been an easy thing, but I wrote this book because it felt necessary. In writing this memoir of my body, in telling you these truths about my body, I am sharing my truth and mine alone. I understand if that truth is not something you want to hear. The truth makes me uncomfortable too. But I am also saying, here is my heart, what’s left of it. Here I am showing you the ferocity of my hunger. Here I am, finally freeing myself to be vulnerable and terribly human. Here I am, reveling in that freedom. Here. See what I hunger for and what my truth has allowed me to create.

Everyone was so worried about me when I broke my ankle and it confused me. I have a huge, loving family and a solid circle of friends, but these things were something of an abstraction, something to take for granted, and then all of a sudden, they weren't... There were lots of concerned texts and e-mails, and I had to face something I've long pretended wasn't true, for reasons I don't fully understand. If i died, I would leave people behind who would struggle with my loss. I finally recognized that I matter to the people in my life and that I have a responsibility to matter to myself and take care of myself so they don't have to lose me before my time, so I can have more time. When I broke my ankle, love was no longer an abstraction. It became this real, frustrating, messy, necessary thing, and I had a lot of it in my life. It was an overwhelming thing to realize. I am still trying to make sense of it all even though it has always been there.

And it’s a shame that the measure is what is not so bad instead of what is thriving and good. I look at some of my worst relationships and think, “at least he or she didn’t hit me.” I work from a place of gratitude for the bare minimum. I’ve never been in a relationship where I’ve had to hide nonconsensual bruises. I’ve never feared for my life. I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t walk away. Does this make me a lucky girl? Given the stories I’ve seen women sharing via the hashtags #whyIstayed and #whyIleft, yes. This is not how we should measure luck. I have had good relationships but it’s hard to trust that because what I consider good sometimes doesn’t feel very good at all. Or I am thinking about testimony and how there has been so much over the past day and some–women sharing their truths, daring to use their voices to say, “This is what happened to me. This is how I have been wronged.” I’ve been thinking about how so much testimony is demanded of women and still, there are those who doubt our stories. There are those who think we are all lucky girls because we are still, they narrowly assume, alive. I am weary of all our sad stories–not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, that there are so many.