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. “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

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. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

8. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

10. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

18. “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

19. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

34. “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

35. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

37. “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

38. “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

39. “Surprisingly, now that the Ache has transformed from idea to reality, I feel relatively steady. Dealing with the dropped shoe is less paralyzing, apparently, than waiting for that shoe to drop.”

— Glennon Doyle

40. “When we let ourselves be moved, we discover what moves us. Heartbreak is not something to be avoided, it’s something to pursue. Heartbreak is one of the greatest clue of our lives.”

— Glennon Doyle

41. “We are alive only to the degree to which we are willing to be annihilated.”

— Glennon Doyle

42. “What is wrong with me? Why did I stay and suffer? The door wasn’t even locked.”

— 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. “Control leaves no room for trust.”

— Glennon Doyle

45. “Defensiveness is for people who are afraid that what they have can be taken from them.”

— Glennon Doyle

46. “In his phone, Chase had found a place easier to exist in than inside his own skin. That was tragic, because inside the itchiness of our own skin is where we discover who we are. When we are bored, we ask ourselves: What do I want to do with myself?”

— Glennon Doyle

47. “Imagination is how personal and worldwide revolutions begin. “I have a dream,” said Martin Luther King, Jr. “Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning,” said Gloria Steinem.”

— Glennon Doyle

48. “I have begun to notice that I don’t even enjoy folks who aren’t at least a tad mentally ill. I don’t wish folks without a little anxiety or depression any harm, I just don’t find myself particularly curious about them. I have come to believe that we “crazies” are the best people.”

— Glennon Doyle

49. “Ihave a son and two daughters, until they tell me otherwise.”

— Glennon Doyle

50. “When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself.”

— Glennon Doyle