Top 200 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

56. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

58. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

60. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

63. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

70. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “In most cultures, folks like Tish are identified early, set apart as shamans, medicine people, poets, and clergy. They are considered eccentric but critical to the survival of the group because they are able to hear things others don’t hear and see things others don’t see and feel things others don’t feel. The culture depends on the sensitivity of a few, because nothing can be healed if it’s not sensed first.”

— Glennon Doyle

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

86. “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

87. “Perhaps imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it. Perhaps when we want to know the original plan for our lives, families, world, we should consult not what’s in front of us but what’s inside us.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

89. “Forgiveness does not mean access. We can give the other person the gift of forgiveness and ourselves the gift of safety and freedom at the very same time.”

— Glennon Doyle

90. “Revelation must come before revolution.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

92. “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.”

— Glennon Doyle

93. “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

94. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

97. “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

98. “So I must live and tell my truth. Folks will come around or quit coming around. Either way: lovely. Anything or anyone I could lose by telling the truth was never mine anyway. I’m willing to lose anything that requires me to hide any part of myself.”

— Glennon Doyle

99. “Freedom is not being for or against an ideal, but creating your own existence from scratch.”

— Glennon Doyle

100. “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