Hunger Quotes

“What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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?”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“I am stronger than I am broken.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“I am not promiscuous with my warmth, but when I share it, my warmth can be as hot as the sun.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“The story of my life is wanting, hungering, for what I cannot have or, perhaps, wanting what I dare not allow myself to have.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“I am weary of all our sad stories—not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, that there are so many.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“I often say that reading and writing saved my life. I mean that quite literally.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“The bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“I reserve my most elaborate delusions and disappointments for myself.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“The medical community is not particularly interested in taking the pain of women seriously.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“I don’t want them, or anyone, to think I am nothing more than the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“I do not suffer from ignorance where exercise is related. I suffer from inertia.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“You are your body, nothing more, and your body should damn well become less.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body