Top 160 Emily Nagoski Quotes (2023 Update)
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51. “Polite, socially acceptable suppression of our rage is “inauthentic,” insofar as we are not sharing our full selves. And that is part of trust, too. Part of being trustworthy is meeting expectations and staying in line, as if you were a well-behaved woman.”

— Emily Nagoski

52. “A simple, practical exercise is to breathe in to a slow count of five, hold that breath for five, then exhale for a slow count of ten, and pause for another count of five. Do that three times – just one minute and fifteen seconds of breathing – and see how you feel.”

— Emily Nagoski

53. “And if a giver doesn’t obediently and sweetly hand over whatever a being wants, for that, too, the giver may be punished, shamed, or even destroyed.”

— Emily Nagoski

54. “The quality of our lives, day to day, is measured by our freedom to choose to stay or leave. That freedom comes when we have abundance enough and safety enough to let go of what is broken and reach for something new.17.”

— Emily Nagoski

55. “Not knowing why is, itself, a profound type of suffering.”

— Emily Nagoski

56. “If you’re anxious or depressed, you are less curious about novelty and are more interested in being in a comfortable, familiar environment.”

— Emily Nagoski

57. “If you’re a woman in the industrialized West, you’ll confront a particular set of enemies that will try to cut you down to size, over and over, and they’ll lie to your face while they do it, saying it’s for your own good, saying you should be grateful for their “help.” And because we’ve been confronting these enemies literally since before we were born, we often believe them.”

— Emily Nagoski

58. “Science is often expensive, and who pays for it can influence the outcome and whether or not the results are published. As enthusiastic as we are about evidence-based practices, it’s important to remember where that evidence comes from and why we might not see contrary evidence.”

— Emily Nagoski

59. “And the answer is, of course, “Ugh, patriarchy.”

— Emily Nagoski

60. “This means intentionally adding distance that creates an edgy instability or uncertainty, a slight and enjoyable dissatisfaction.”

— Emily Nagoski

61. “When you were born, you were deeply, gloriously satisfied with each and every part of your body.”

— Emily Nagoski

62. “The problem is not that women don’t try. On the contrary, we’re trying all the time, to do and be all the things everyone demands from us.”

— Emily Nagoski

63. “And the resource abundance of the environment you’re in changes how you decide to quit or stay. In a resource-rich environment, people actually quit and move on to the next opportunity sooner, because the risk of the move is lower. It’s easier to change jobs when you’ve got four offers. It’s easier to leave a bad relationship when you can go straight to a loving relationship with someone else.”

— Emily Nagoski

64. “As Naomi Wolf puts it, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience.” Thin bodies are the bodies of women who behave themselves.”

— Emily Nagoski

65. “In the garden metaphor, the cultural messages about women’s sexuality are very often weeds, encroaching in ways no one chose but that everyone has to manage.”

— Emily Nagoski

66. “When you are cruel to yourself, contemptuous and shaming, you only increase the cruelty of the world; when you are kind and compassionate to yourself, you increase the kindness and compassion in the world. Being compassionate toward yourself- not self-indulgent or self-pitying, but kind- is both the least you can do and the single most important thing you can do to make the world a better place... the world is changed when we change.”

— Emily Nagoski

67. “Happiness is predicated on ‘happenings,’ on what’s occurring, on whether your life is going right, and whether all is well. Joy arises from an internal clarity about our purpose.”1 When we engage with something larger than ourselves, we make meaning; and when we can resonate, bell-like, with that Something Larger, that’s joy.”

— Emily Nagoski

68. “In short, emotions are tunnels. If you go all the way through them, you get to the light at the end. Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion.”

— Emily Nagoski

69. “We call her “the madwoman in the attic,” and she’s the subject of the next, and last, chapter.”

— Emily Nagoski

70. “Let’s invent a ritual where women celebrate the transition into their postpartum bodies. I mean, it’s not just its appearance that changes, it’s what your body means, to yourself and to the world.”

— Emily Nagoski

71. “Wellness is not a state of being, but a state of action.”

— Emily Nagoski

72. “The Mindful Way through Depression by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Don’t let the “through depression” part throw you; it’s a practical guide to managing any uncomfortable emotional experience.”

— Emily Nagoski

73. “If you’re feeling not just frustrated and challenged, but helpless, isolated, and trapped, like you want to hide in a cave, or like you’d rather put your hand in a toilet full of tadpoles than spend one more day doing the thing, you should definitely quit whatever it is.”

— Emily Nagoski

74. “It makes perfect sense when you think about it. If you’re moving toward a specific, desired goal, your attention and efforts are focused on that single outcome. But if you’re moving away from a threat, it hardly matters where you end up, as long as it’s somewhere safe from the threat.”

— Emily Nagoski

75. “In terms of that little monitor in your brain, the solution is to sustain just a little bit of dissatisfaction – not enough to cross into frustration and certainly not so much that you fall off the cliff into the pit of despair, but enough to nourish your curious, “moving-toward” energy.”

— Emily Nagoski

76. “The key to managing stress effectively is to make efforts to complete the cycle – unlock from freeze, escape the predator, kill the enemy, rejoice.”

— Emily Nagoski

77. “Affection. When friendly chitchat with colleagues doesn’t cut it, when you’re too stressed out for laughter, deeper connection with a loving presence is called for. Most often, this comes from some loving and beloved person who likes, respects, and trusts you, whom you like, respect, and trust.”

— Emily Nagoski

78. “A final caution: Too often, we mistake dealing with the stressors for dealing with the stress.”

— Emily Nagoski

79. “Why is it dying?” to “Wow!” And it’s this: responsive desire.1 Responsive, in contrast to spontaneous desire.”

— Emily Nagoski

80. “Dealing with your stress is a separate process from dealing with the things that cause your stress. To deal with your stress, you have to complete the cycle.”

— Emily Nagoski

81. “We thrive when we have a positive goal to move toward, not just a negative state we’re trying to move away from. If we hate where we are, our first instinct often is to run aimlessly away from the owl of our present circumstances, which may lead us somewhere not much better than where we started. We need something positive to move toward. We need the cheese.”

— Emily Nagoski

82. “We’ve locked ourselves, culturally, into our own fear, rage, and despair. We must build time, space, and strategies for discharging our stress response cycles.”

— Emily Nagoski

83. “But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will.”

— Emily Nagoski

84. “Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last.”

— Emily Nagoski

85. “At last, Sophie let herself dive in, and her world transformed. She said, “I thought love would just be like being me, plus knowing that if I’m bleeding to death somebody will call an ambulance. But it’s more than that. I see myself in his eyes, and I find new ways to know and love myself, at the same time that I find new ways to know and love him, and then I know and love us and what we are together, which is this thing beyond what either of us is.”

— Emily Nagoski

86. “How do we work with the organic intelligence of the body to heal? Instead of managing what comes up from the body, we work with it, trusting its purpose and direction, while holding a very particular, healing framework.”

— Emily Nagoski

87. “We can think of insecure attachment as fitting into two different strategies: anxious and avoidant.”

— Emily Nagoski

88. “But the best romance novels are the ones where the se isn’t just gratuitous for the sake of entertainment.”

— Emily Nagoski

89. “Lives may be experienced as meaningful when they are felt to have significance beyond the trivial or momentary, to have purpose, or to have a coherence that transcends chaos.”7.”

— Emily Nagoski

90. “That’s why you keep trying mindfulness and green smoothies and self-care trend after self-care trend. But that instinct for self-preservation is battling a syndrome that insists that self-preservation is selfish, so your efforts to care for yourself might actually make things worse, activating even more punishment from the world or from yourself, because how dare you?”

— Emily Nagoski

91. “Why we fall in love is attachment, which is sort of a biological pursuit of wholeness.”

— Emily Nagoski

92. “Allowing time and space for your body to move all the way through the cycle, to discharge stress and to connect wholly with your partner, is an essential part of creating a context that grants maximum access to pleasure.”

— Emily Nagoski

93. “You get to decide what plants stay and what plants go, which plants get attention and love and which are ignored, pruned away to nothing, or dug out and thrown on the compost heap to rot. You get to choose.”

— Emily Nagoski

94. “We don’t need other people’s love in order to love ourselves; we don’t need a romantic partner to be ‘complete.’ But we need other people to teach us how to love ourselves best.”

— Emily Nagoski

95. “You turn into a bunny hiding under a hedge. Imagine a rabbit being chased by a fox, and she runs under a bush to hide. How long does she stay there? Until the fox is gone, right?”

— Emily Nagoski

96. “Novices who are thoroughly incompetent rate themselves as very confident in their ability to do a thing they’ve just learned to do. By contrast, genuine experts know how difficult their work is, so they are realistic about their competence and thus rate their confidence in their own abilities as moderate, even as their performance is, of course, expert-level.”

— Emily Nagoski

97. “Being with the tribe doesn’t replace the Feels built into completing the cycle. We need to discharge the stress response, complete the cycle, before our bodies can move on.”

— Emily Nagoski

98. “2. Social Appropriateness. Sometimes the brain activates a stress response and you can’t do the thing it’s trying to tell you to do:.”

— Emily Nagoski

99. “You can chart the progress of women in America by the things Disney heroines sing about in their “I Want” songs.”

— Emily Nagoski

100. “Everyone’s life is different, and we are all doing our best. “Our best” today may not be “the best there is,” but it’s the best we can do today. Which is strange. And yet true. And could draw us down into helplessness and isolation if we don’t stay anchored. And the way we stay anchored is with gratitude.”

— Emily Nagoski