Top 200 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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. I finally stopped avoiding fires long enough to let myself burn, and what I learned was that I am like that burning bush: The fire of pain won’t consume me. I can burn and burn and live. I can live on fire. I am fireproof.”

— Glennon Doyle

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. Even the hard ones.”

— Glennon Doyle

65. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

68. “Own your wanting. Eat the apple. Let it burn.”

— Glennon Doyle

69. “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

70. “I told myself: Maybe in a different life. Isn’t that interesting? As if I had more than one.”

— Glennon Doyle

71. “First the pain, then the waiting, then the rising. All of our suffering comes when we try to get to our resurrection without allowing ourselves to be crucified first.”

— Glennon Doyle

72. “We only control what we don’t trust.”

— Glennon Doyle

73. “If you are uncomfortable – in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused – you don’t have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right.”

— Glennon Doyle

74. “Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you’re there because you hit a triple.”

— Glennon Doyle

75. “Here’s to The Untamed: May we know them. May we raise them. May we love them. May we read them. May we elect them. May we be them.”

— Glennon Doyle

76. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

78. “A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter.”

— Glennon Doyle

79. “To be humble is to be grounded in knowing who you are. It implies the responsibility to become what you were meant to become – to grow, to reach, to fully bloom as high and strong and grand as you were created to. It is not honorable for a tree to wilt and shrink and disappear. It’s not honorable for a woman to, either. I’ve never pretended to be stronger than I am, so I’m sure as hell not going to pretend I’m weaker than I am.”

— Glennon Doyle

80. “My little girl is not broken. She is a prophet. I want to be wise enough to stop with her, ask her what she feels, and listen to what she knows.”

— Glennon Doyle

81. “Rebellion is as much of a cage as obedience is. They both mean living in reaction to someone else’s way instead of forging your own.”

— Glennon Doyle

82. “Our judgment is self-protection; it’s a cage we put around ourselves. We hope it will keep danger out, but it only keeps tenderness and empathy from coming in.”

— Glennon Doyle

83. “Gender is not wild, it’s prescribed. When we say, “Girls are nurturing and boys are ambitious. Girls are soft and boys are tough. Girls are emotional and boys are stoic,” we are not telling truths, we are sharing beliefs – beliefs that have become mandates. If these statements seem true, it’s because everyone has been so well programmed. Human qualities are not gendered.”

— Glennon Doyle

84. “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

85. “I learned that you can break a child’s heart without breaking a child.”

— Glennon Doyle

86. “Sometimes I wondered if I wasn’t the only one using her skin to contain herself. Maybe we are all fire wrapped in skin, trying to look cool.”

— Glennon Doyle

87. “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

88. “You are not here to waste your time deciding whether my life is true and beautiful enough for you. You are here to decide if your life, relationships, and world are true and beautiful enough for you.”

— Glennon Doyle

89. “This way of life requires living in integrity: ensuring that my inner self and outer self are integrated. Integrity means having only one self. Dividing into two selves – the shown self and the hidden self – that is brokenness, so I do whatever it takes to stay whole. I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself wherever I am, and I let the world adjust.”

— Glennon Doyle

90. “You are here to decide if your life, relationships and world are true and beautiful enough for you. And if they are not and you dare to admit they are not, you must decide if you have the guts, the right – perhaps even the duty – to burn to the ground that which is not true and beautiful enough and get started building what is.”

— Glennon Doyle

91. “To be brave is to forsake all others to be true to yourself. That is the vow of a confident girl.”

— Glennon Doyle

92. “In my thirties, I learned that there is a type of pain in life that I want to feel. It’s the inevitable, excruciating, necessary pain of losing beautiful things: trust, dreams, health, animals, relationships, people. This kind of pain is the price of love, the cost of living a brave, openhearted life – and I’ll pay it. There is another kind of pain that comes not from losing beautiful things but from never even trying for them.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

94. “What if we used our mothering love less like a laser, burning holes into the children assigned to us, and more like the sun, making sure all kids are warm?”

— Glennon Doyle

95. “Your body is nature, and nature is pure. I know that’s hard for you to accept because you have been at war with your body for so long. You think your body is bad, but it is not. It’s wise. Your body will tell you things your mind will talk you out of.”

— Glennon Doyle

96. “Now when I feel lost, I remember that I am not the woods. I am my own tree. So I return to myself and reinhabit myself. As I do, I feel my chin rise and my body straighten.”

— Glennon Doyle

97. “The only thing that was every wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me.”

— Glennon Doyle

98. “In America, there are not two kinds of people, racists and nonracists. There are three kinds of people: those poisoned by racism and actively choosing to spread it; those poisoned by racism and actively trying to detox; and those poisoned by racism who deny its very existence inside them.”

— Glennon Doyle

99. “Progress is just perpetually undoing our no longer true enough systems in order to create new ones that more closely fit people as they really are. People aren’t changing, after all. It’s just that for the first time there’s enough freedom for people to stop changing who they are. Progress is the acknowledgment of what is and what has always been. Progress is always a returning.”

— Glennon Doyle

100. “That’s when I stopped looking at Abby and thinking: What is my anger telling me about her? And started asking: What is my anger telling me about me? My anger was delivering a package with one of my root beliefs in it – a belief that was programmed into me during childhood: Resting is laziness, and laziness is disrespect. Worthiness and goodness are earned with hustle.”

— Glennon Doyle