Top 200 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

58. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

60. “Revelation must come before revolution.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

64. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

78. “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

79. “Hard work is important. So are play and nonproductivity. My worth is tied not to my productivity but to my existence. I am worthy of rest.”

— Glennon Doyle

80. “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

81. “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

82. “I love how our life together is one eternal conversation that we put on pause only to sleep.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

84. “No Fear In. No Fear Out. Only Love In. Only Love Out.”

— Glennon Doyle

85. “I don’t think brave means what we’ve been saying it means. We tell our children that brave means feeling afraid and doing it anyway, but is this the definition we want them to carry as they grow older?”

— Glennon Doyle

86. “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

87. “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

88. “It’s just that living with anxiety – living alarmed – makes it impossible to enter the moment, to land inside my body and be there. I cannot be in the moment because I am too afraid of what the next moment will bring. I have to be ready.”

— 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. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “Playing dumb, weak and silly is a disservice to yourself. Every time you pretend to be less than you are, you steal permission from other women to exist fully. Don’t mistake modesty for humility.”

— Glennon Doyle

94. “You can’t lose people who never even found you.”

— Glennon Doyle

95. “I’d restored my own boundaries. I’d begun to trust myself, because I’d become a woman who refuses to abandon herself to keep false peace.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

97. “It is a blessing to know a free woman. Sometimes she will stop by and hold up a mirror for you. She will help you remember who you are.”

— Glennon Doyle

98. “I walked away from my cages. I slowly built a new marriage, a new faith, a new worldview, a new purpose, a new family, and a new identity by design instead of default. From my imagination instead of my indoctrination. From my wild instead of from my training.”

— Glennon Doyle

99. “Good art originates not from the desire to show off but from the desire to show yourself. Good art always comes from our desperate desire to breathe, to be seen, to be loved.”

— Glennon Doyle

100. “I was wild until I was tamed by shame.”

— Glennon Doyle