Roxane Gay Quotes

Love is a deception and a trap. Love is as big a myth that God sits with his flowing white beard in a throne and looks at us.

People - not just in their teenage years - hold on to this fantasy of love when they're not ready to have a real relationship.

We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists... in the loved one, perfection.

The man that thinks he loves his mistress for her own sake is mightily mistaken.

...have a theory that she is in love with the dream of someone and not an actual person.

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

I am a sucker for romance and I love girls and that is a terrible combination, because romance has the ability to overwhelm your perspective.

There's something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow.

I was blinded by being a romantic person.

I try not to kid myself. You know, I don't mind romancing someone else, but to fool yourself is pretty devastating and dangerous.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

Used to do a lot of falling in love with people, almost in the street, and imagining that there would be no obstacle to a happy love story other than finding the 'right person'.

Like everybody, I too believed that couples lived happily ever after. But it only happens in books.

I used to love the idea of being in love, even though I hadn't been in love before.

And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.

You cannot be in love with love.

I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger. Whenever I wanted, I could get him out and he'd look at me the way boys do in films, as if I'm beautiful.

Romance is finding your fantasy in people who don't have it.

I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.

We’ve all selected the wrong partners, all gotten hurt, and hopefully all moved on wiser for the experience. But there are those who, even in the face of constant disappointment, continue to believe that the intensity of their desire will be rewarded by an eventual jackpot of affection. And if that’s the slot machine you’re playing, friend, you’d better leave the casino ‘cause that one don’t pay out

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

I'm as much a victim of the romantic myth of 'getting away' as anyone else. My head tells me it's myth, but I don't want to believe it is.

People can rationalize in funny ways to hold onto their dreams and needs.

There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so.

We have this idealized romanticism about how love might solve all of our problems, but then it doesn't.