A Quote by Roxane Gay

There is an odd assumption that compassion and care are finite or that critics can be everything to everyone - commenting on everything simply because they can. That's not what cultural criticism is.
There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda, but it doesn't work that way.
We live in an age where everyone is so opinionated about everything in general in life, especially their expertise or their personal knowledge of anything that they're commenting on.
I know there's always going to be feedback no matter what the subject. I am shocked by somebody commenting on my shoes or my clothes. Everyone has an opinion, everyone is logging about everything and has an opinion. So I can't possibly pay attention to that.
Compassion is the foundation of everything positive, everything good. If you carry the power of compassion to the marketplace and the dinner table, you can make your life really count.
The mathematics is the odd one, odd because I'm not sure how to measure its effect. It is so fundamental to my outlook on everything and yet I'm not even sure how. It must be because in my formative years it was everything to me, the single place of beauty in my life, and of breathtaking beauty at that. I still believe that pure mathematics is the most creative thing that humanity does, though I am no longer a part of it.
You have to assume that everything you do is public knowledge. Everything. Because now everyone is a reporter. Everyone is a photographer.
I don't really give in to the critics because critics are always going to criticize, and what have they done? A person who has never done nothing can't really care nothing about doing something. So as far as the critics, I don't care what they think. I don't have time to give to critics.
Assumption Theory: The only safe assumption in life is that the person who assures you that everything is all right is all wrong.
Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.
I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.
In Strapping, I had experimented with a creative catharsis under the assumption that art doesn't need to be accountable for itself, but I found out in very practical ways that you are accountable for everything you say. Everything you write, everything you do becomes not only your identity but your world resonates with it.
It seems odd that at the beginning of the Internet, everyone decided everything should stick around forever.
When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.
Everything ends, and Everything matters. Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got…and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.
PERSONAL IMPORTANCE or taking things personally, is an expression of SELFISHNESS because we make the assumption that everything is about ME!! NOTHING PEOPLE DO IS BECAUSE OF YOU!! IT'S BECAUSE OF THEMSELVES!!
I thought I could rely on the plot in the novel and fill in the colour between the lines, but I made a mistake with that assumption. It was really, really hard because you pull a few things apart and then you realise how everything relies on everything else and it can all fall apart.
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