There are writers who can show you the excellence of their brains and writers who show you the depths of their souls: I don't know any writer who does both at the same time as brilliantly as Roxane Gay.

truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. i don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my entire life, who says, i know me too. i want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?

Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover a common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who's lacking. Hasn't everyone found a strange ignorance in someone beguiling? . . .Nowadays, trendy librarians, wanting to be important, say, Knowledge is power. I know better. Knowledge is love.

I come from food the way some people come from money. Food was the medium I grew up in, what we talked about, what shaped our days.

My father was right: you could make anybody amazing just by insisting they were.

but you can't spend your whole life hoping people will ask you the right questions. you must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask.

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.