Top 200 Emily Nagoski Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “We call her “the madwoman in the attic,” and she’s the subject of the next, and last, chapter.”

— Emily Nagoski

102. “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

103. “Redefining winning in terms of incremental goals is not the same as giving yourself rewards for making progress – such rewards are counterintuitively ineffective and may even be detrimental.12 When you redefine winning, you set goals that are achievements in themselves – and success is its own reward.”

— Emily Nagoski

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “Completing the cycle requires that, instead of hitting the brake on our stress, we gently remove our foot from both the accelerator and the brake and allow ourselves to coast to a stop.6 To do that, you create the right context and trust your body to do its thing.”

— Emily Nagoski

108. “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

109. “1. emotional exhaustion – the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long; 2. depersonalization – the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion; and 3. decreased sense of accomplishment – an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.1.”

— Emily Nagoski

110. “But we think rest matters not because it makes you more productive, but because it makes you happier and healthier, less grumpy, and more creative. We think rest matters because you matter. You are not here to be “productive.” You are here to be you, to engage with your Something Larger, to move through the world with confidence and joy. And to do that, you require rest.”

— Emily Nagoski

111. “When you get right down to it, self-criticism is yet another form of stress... Literally, our stress hormone levels increase.”

— Emily Nagoski

112. “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

113. “Self-compassion is hard because healing hurts and growing stronger can be scary. But it’s worth it because healing helps us grow mighty enough to heal Human Giver Syndrome.”

— Emily Nagoski

114. “Freeze happens when the brain assesses the threat and decides you’re too slow to run and too small to fight, and so your best hope for survival is to “play dead” until the threat goes away or someone comes along to help you. Freeze is your last-ditch stress response, reserved for threats that the brain perceives as life-threatening, when fight or flight don’t stand a chance.”

— Emily Nagoski

115. “Nonjudging is neutrally noticing your own internal states.”

— Emily Nagoski

116. “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

117. “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

118. “This is the upside-down world we live in: in most situations in the modern, post-industrial West, the stress itself will kill you faster than the stressor will – unless you do something to complete the stress response cycle.”

— Emily Nagoski

119. “From this point of view, intimate conversation, affection, and friendship are central to the erotic life of a long-term relationship.”

— Emily Nagoski

120. “Images matter. They tell us what’s possible, what things go together, what belongs and what doesn’t belong. And we’re all just trying to belong somewhere.”

— Emily Nagoski

121. “This is the tragedy of the madwoman. She whips us, and we achieve things. And so we think the whipping is why we achieved things and we’ll never achieve anything without the whipping.”

— Emily Nagoski

122. “Realistic expectations can make all the difference-for instance, it’s normal for it to take six months to a year for a couple to get pregnant, and 15 percept of couples don’t conceive within that first year.”

— Emily Nagoski

123. “But in the nineteenth century, with the rise of the middle class, it became fashionable for a man to be able to afford a wife who was too weak to work. It was a status symbol, an advertisement of wealth, for a man to have a wife who not only didn’t but couldn’t contribute to the household income. “Delicate” and “fragile” became feminine virtues.”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “And just as everyone’s genitals are normal and beautiful, so all women’s bodies are normal and beautiful. But mostly that’s not what women are taught. Mostly we’re taught that our bodies are supposed to be one specific shape, otherwise there’s something wrong with us. I’ll talk about that – and how to overcome it – in chapter 5.”

— Emily Nagoski

129. “Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.”

— Emily Nagoski

130. “We need to discharge the stress response, complete the cycle, before our bodies can move on. “Home” is the place – physical and emotional – where we can discharge stress without being judged or shamed or told we just need to relax or forget about it. “Home” is where we receive our partner’s “loving presence.” People who listen with a loving presence are calm, attentive, and warmly attuned to the other person.”

— Emily Nagoski

131. “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

132. “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

133. “Breathing. Deep, slow breaths downregulate the stress response – especially when the exhalation is long and slow and goes all the way to the end of the breath, so that your belly contracts. Breathing is most effective when your stress isn’t that high, or when you just need to siphon off the very worst of the stress so that you can get through a difficult situation, after which you’ll do something more hardcore.”

— Emily Nagoski

134. “That means that somewhere inside them, they believe that if they’re isolated, that’s good; isolation protects others from their real, core badness. And if they’re suffering, that’s good; it prevents them from growing mighty, which might lead to them having power that they would inevitably fail to use effectively, or might even abuse.”

— Emily Nagoski

135. “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

136. “Being grateful for good things doesn’t erase the difficult things.”

— Emily Nagoski

137. “Self-compassion is being patient with yourself through that process – and being patient with yourself when you need to take a break.”

— Emily Nagoski

138. “To feel normal is to feel that you belong.”

— Emily Nagoski

139. “Positive reappraisal involves recognizing that sitting in traffic is worth it. It means deciding that the effort, the discomfort, the frustration, the unanticipated obstacles, and even the repeated failure have value – not just because they are steps toward a worthwhile goal, but because you reframe difficulties as opportunities for growth and learning.3.”

— Emily Nagoski

140. “John Gottman, in The Science of Trust, says that the problem is not lack of distance and mystery but lack of deepening intimacy.”

— Emily Nagoski

141. “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

142. “These changes in perception are not “just in your head.” People who are given a drug that will relax them and are told, “This is a drug that will relax you,” not only feel more relaxed compared to those who got the drug but not the information, they also have more of the drug in their blood plasma.11 Context changes more than how you feel; it can change your blood chemistry.”

— Emily Nagoski

143. “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

144. “For a lot of people, the most difficult thing about “completing the cycle” is that it almost always requires that they stop dealing with whatever caused the stress, step away from that situation, and turn instead toward their own body and emotions.”

— Emily Nagoski

145. “When we see women who aren’t trying to control their appearance or their emotions so that they aren’t making anyone uncomfortable, or who use their time, money, and labor to improve their own well-being rather than someone else’s, “What’s the matter with her?” we say to ourselves. “If I have to follow the rules, so does she! She needs to get back in line.” And we call that unruly woman fat or bossy or full of herself. As if those are bad things.”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

147. “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.”

— Emily Nagoski

148. “Positive Social Interaction.”

— Emily Nagoski

149. “Perfectionists set goals that are impossible – and if they somehow manage to achieve a goal, they assume that goal must be worthless and they set another, even more impossible goal. Which puts them in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction.”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski