Top 200 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “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

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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

7. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

9. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

11. “Which of my beliefs are of my own creation and which were programmed into me?”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

19. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

21. “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

22. “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

23. “Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you’re there because you hit a triple. Malicious privilege is complaining that those starving outside the ballpark aren’t waiting patiently enough.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

25. “And now that we don’t have to be good, we can be free.”

— Glennon Doyle

26. “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

27. “I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been. There is no map.”

— Glennon Doyle

28. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

30. “Control leaves no room for trust.”

— Glennon Doyle

31. “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.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

33. “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

34. “What if love is not the process of disappearing for the beloved but of emerging for the beloved? What if a mother’s responsibility is teaching her children that love does not lock the lover away but frees her? What if a responsible mother is not one who shows her children how to slowly die but how to stay wildly alive until the day she dies? What if the call of motherhood is not to be a martyr but to be a model?”

— Glennon Doyle

35. “I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself wherever I am, and I let the world adjust.”

— Glennon Doyle

36. “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

37. “Mercy and empathy are great threats to an unjust society.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

39. “Love is the opposite of control. Love demands trust.”

— Glennon Doyle

40. “There is no one way to live, love, raise children, arrange a family, run a school, a community, a nation. The norms were created by somebody, and each of us is somebody. We can make our own normal.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

42. “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

43. “Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning,” said Gloria Steinem.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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