Top 200 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”

— Glennon Doyle

2. “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in. – Archbishop Desmond Tutu.”

— Glennon Doyle

3. “We can do hard things, like be alive and love deep and lose it all, because we do these hard things alongside everyone who has ever walked the Earth with her eyes, arms, and heart wide open.”

— Glennon Doyle

4. “Depression and anxiety are not feelings. Feelings return me to myself. Depression and anxiety are body snatchers that suck me out of myself so that I appear to be there but I’m really gone. Other people can still see me, but no one can feel me anymore – including me. For me, the tragedy of mental illness is not that I’m sad but that I’m not anything. Mental illness makes me miss my own life.”

— Glennon Doyle

5. “Because once we feel, know, and dare to imagine more for ourselves, we cannot unfeel, unknow, or unimagine. There is no going back.”

— Glennon Doyle

6. “To live a life of her own, each woman must also answer: What do I love? What makes me come alive? What is beauty to me, and when do I take the time to fill up with it? Who is the soul beneath all of these roles? Each woman must answer these questions now, before the tide comes.”

— Glennon Doyle

7. “This is the most revolutionary thing a woman can do: the next precise thing, one thing at a time, without asking permission or offering explanation. This way of life is thrilling.”

— Glennon Doyle

8. “The anxiety that makes it difficult to exist in my own skin also makes it difficult to exist in a world where so may people are in so much pain – and that makes me a relentless activist.”

— Glennon Doyle

9. “Grief shatters. If you let yourself shatter and then you put yourself back together, piece by piece, you wake up one day and realize that you have been completely reassembled. You are whole again, and strong, but you are suddenly a new shape, a new size. The change that happens to people who really sit in their pain – whether it’s a sliver of envy lasting an hour or a canyon of grief lasting decades – it’s revolutionary.”

— Glennon Doyle

10. “A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter. When she finally understands that she is creating something different from what her parents created. When she begins to build her island not to their specifications but to hers. When she finally understands that it is not her duty to convince everyone on her island to accept and respect her.”

— Glennon Doyle

11. “This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been.”

— Glennon Doyle

12. “What if parenting became less about telling our children who they should be and more about asking them again and again forever who they already are? Then, when they tell us, we would celebrate instead of concede. It’s not: I love you no matter which of my expectations you meet or don’t meet. It’s: My only expectation is that you become yourself. The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me.”

— Glennon Doyle

13. “The braver I am, the luckier I get.”

— Glennon Doyle

14. “I can feel everything and survive. What I thought would kill me, didn’t. Every time I said to myself: I can’t take this anymore – I was wrong. The truth was that I could and did take it all – and I kept surviving. Surviving again and again made me less afraid of myself, of other people, of life. I learned that I’d never be free from pain but I could be free from the fear of pain, and that was enough.”

— Glennon Doyle

15. “You are allowed to take up space on this earth with your feelings, your ideas, your body. You do not need to shrink. You do not need to hide any part of yourself, ever.”

— Glennon Doyle

16. “Control leaves no room for trust.”

— Glennon Doyle

17. “Every life is an unprecedented experiment. This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been. There is no map. We are all pioneers.”

— Glennon Doyle

18. “Anger delivers our boundaries to us. Our boundaries deliver our beliefs to us.”

— Glennon Doyle

19. “Feelings are for feeling. All of them.”

— Glennon Doyle

20. “Let’s conjure up, from the depths off our souls: The truest, most beautiful lives we can imagine.”

— Glennon Doyle

21. “I quit spending my life trying to control myself and began to trust myself. We only control what we don’t trust. We can either control our selves or love our selves, but we can’t do both. Love is the opposite of control. Love demands trust.”

— Glennon Doyle

22. “Sometimes to live again, we have to let ourselves die completely. We have to let ourselves become completely, utterly new. When grief rings, surrender. There is nothing else to do. The delivery is utter transformation.”

— Glennon Doyle

23. “All the devil has to do to win is convince you he’s God.”

— Glennon Doyle

24. “As every architect or designer knows, there is a critical step between vision and reality. Before imagination becomes three-dimensional, it usually needs to become two-dimensional. It’s as though the unseen order needs to come to life one dimension at a time.”

— Glennon Doyle

25. “Our beliefs determine how we experience the world.”

— Glennon Doyle

26. “Let’s conjure up, from the depths of our souls: The truest, most beautiful lives we can imagine. The truest, most beautiful families we can fathom. The truest, most beautiful world we can hope for. Let’s put it all on paper.”

— Glennon Doyle

27. “Right now, you are being required to choose between remaining an obedient daughter and becoming a responsible mother. Choose mother. Every damn time from here on out, choose mother. Your parents had their turn to build their island. Your turn.”

— Glennon Doyle

28. “I’ll not abandon myself. Not ever again. Me and myself: We are till death do us part. We’ll forsake all others to remain whole. I unbecame a woman who believed that another would complete me when I decided that I was born complete.”

— Glennon Doyle

29. “That truth feels like an attack because we have been protected by comfortable lies for so long.”

— Glennon Doyle

30. “As I climbed out of the tub and shook my hair dry, I told myself: Maybe in a different life. Isn’t that interesting? As if I had more than one.”

— Glennon Doyle

31. “Actually, maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s you, world. Maybe my inability to adapt to the world is not because I’m crazy but because I’m paying attention. Maybe it’s not insane to reject the world as it is. Maybe the real insanity is surrendering to the world as it is. Maybe pretending that things around here are just fine is no badge of honor I want to wear. Maybe it’s exactly right to be a little crazy. Maybe the truth is: World, you need my poetry.”

— Glennon Doyle

32. “I understand myself differently now. I was just a caged girl made for wide-open skies. I wasn’t crazy. I was a goddamn cheetah.”

— Glennon Doyle

33. “This is what I know. Parents love their children. I have met no exceptions. Love is a river, and there are times when impediments stop the flow of love. Mental illness, addiction, shame, narcissism, fear passed down by religious and cultural institutions – these are boulders that interrupt love’s flow.”

— Glennon Doyle

34. “The truth of my thirties was: Stay on your mat, Glennon. The staying is making you. The truth of my forties is: I’m made. I will not stay, not ever again – in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself. When my body tells me the truth, I’ll believe it.”

— Glennon Doyle

35. “My children do not need me to save them. My children need to watch me save myself.”

— Glennon Doyle

36. “I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming. My goal is not to remain the same but to live in such a way that each day, year, moment, relationship, conversation, and crisis is the material I use to become a truer, more beautiful version of myself.”

— Glennon Doyle

37. “The miracle of grace is that you can give what you have never gotten.”

— Glennon Doyle

38. “May we all live in communities where every person’s truest Self is both held and free.”

— Glennon Doyle

39. “We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a “real man’s” dirty secret.”

— Glennon Doyle

40. “I think that control might actually be the opposite of love, because control leaves no room for trust – and maybe love without trust is not love at all.”

— Glennon Doyle

41. “That is when I realized that where she was, I could not go. Grief is a lonely basement guest room. No one, not even your sister, can join you there.”

— Glennon Doyle

42. “I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever.”

— Glennon Doyle

43. “If you wish me well but vote against my family being protected by the law, you do not love me. Thank you for understanding that to love me as yourself means to want for me and for my family every good thing you want for yourself and your family.”

— Glennon Doyle

44. “Here’s the rub: Destruction is essential to construction. If we want to build the new, we must be willing to let the old burn. We must be committed to holding on to nothing but the truth.”

— Glennon Doyle

45. “When we call martyrdom love we teach our children that when love begins, life ends. This is why Jung suggested: There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.”

— Glennon Doyle

46. “I am not a good friend. I have never been capable of or willing to commit to the maintenance that the rules of friendship dictate. I cannot rmember bithdays. I do not want to meet for coffee. I will not host the baby shower. I won’t text back because it’s an eternal game of Ping-Pong, the texting. It never ends. I inevitably disappoint friends, so after enough of that, I decided I would stop trying. I don’t want to live in constant debt. This is okay with me.”

— Glennon Doyle

47. “The blueprints of heaven are etched in the deep desires of women. What women want is good. What women want is beautiful. And what women want is dangerous, but not to women. Not to the common good. What women want is a threat to the injustice of the status quo.”

— Glennon Doyle

48. “Breathe. Don’t panic and flee. Sink. Feel it all. Imagine. Let it burn.”

— Glennon Doyle

49. “Our next life will always cost us this one. If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just were, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true.”

— Glennon Doyle

50. “My faith has nothing to do with religion anymore. To me, living by faith is allowing the swelling and pressing inside me to direct my outward words and decisions. Because to me, God is not a being outside of me: God is the fire, the nudge, the warm liquid gold swelling and pressing inside me.”

— Glennon Doyle