Top 200 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Love is the opposite of control. Love demands trust.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

103. “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

104. “Hard feelings rang my bell and then left me with a package filled with brand-spanking-new information about myself. This new information was always exactly what I needed to know about myself to take the next step in my life with confidence and creativity. It turned out that what I needed most was inside the one place I’d been running from my entire life: pain. Everything I needed to know next was inside the discomfort of now.”

— Glennon Doyle

105. “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

106. “I’d quit using my children as an excuse to not be brave and start seeing them as my reason to be brave. I would leave their father and I would claim friendship-and-fire love, or I would be alone. But I would never again be alone in a relationship and pretend that was love. I would never again settle for a relationship or life less beautiful than the one I’d want for my child. I’d divorce Craig. Because I am a mother. And I have responsibilities.”

— Glennon Doyle

107. “If depression feels like sinking below, anxiety is a shaky hovering above... Anxiety is feeling terrified about my lack of control over anything, and obsessing is my antidote.”

— Glennon Doyle

108. “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

109. “Tish looked up at me and said, “Mommy. I just can’t stop thinking: It’s the polar bears now. But nobody cares. So next, it’s gonna be us.”

— Glennon Doyle

110. “We forgot how to know when we learned how to please.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

112. “Milling with people I do not know is my idea of hell on Earth. I do not mill.”

— Glennon Doyle

113. “There is no such thing as a feminine quality, because there is no such thing as masculinity or femininity. “Femininity” is just a set of human characteristics a culture pours into a bucket and slaps with the label “feminine.”

— Glennon Doyle

114. “If you feel warm toward me but also believe I’m going to burn in hell, you do not love me. 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. Anything less than that is less than love.”

— Glennon Doyle

115. “When a child got sick, it was assumed that she was broken. We didn’t yet understand that many sick children are canaries in coal mines, passively inhaling toxins in the air of their families or cultures or both. So I was separated, sent away to therapists and doctors who tried to fix me instead of trying to fix the toxins I was breathing.”

— Glennon Doyle

116. “I decide to take the risk on this family. Not because I won’t get hurt, but because they are the right people to get hurt by.”

— Glennon Doyle

117. “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

118. “Maybe my role with the people I love is not imagining the truest, most beautiful life for them and then pushing them toward it. Maybe I’m just supposed to ask what they feel and know and imagine. And then, no matter how different their unseen order is from mine, ask what I can do to support their vision.”

— Glennon Doyle

119. “Paris says: We are here for such a short time. We might as well sit down for a long while with some good coffee, company, and bread. Here, there is more time to be human, maybe because there has been more time to learn how.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

121. “We want to be loved. We want to be loved. We want to be loved.”

— Glennon Doyle

122. “Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless. Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely.”

— Glennon Doyle

123. “I have been in a mixed-gender marriage and in a same-gender marriage. The same-gender marriage feels so much more natural to me, because there is no constant effort to bridge the gap between two genders that have been trained by our culture to love and live so differently.”

— Glennon Doyle

124. “Buechner’s “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

— Glennon Doyle

125. “Courage says, “I will not let the fact that I cannot do everything keep me from doing what I can.”

— Glennon Doyle

126. “Human qualities are not gendered. What is gendered is permission to express certain traits. Why? Why would our culture prescribe such strict gender roles? And why would it be so important for our culture to label all tenderness and mercy as feminine?”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

128. “That is also why all a political candidate must do to earn evangelical allegiance is claim to be antiabortion and antigay – even if the candidate is a man who hates and abuses women, who stockpiles money and rejects immigrants, who incites racism and bigotry, who lives in every way antithetical to Jesus’s teachings.”

— Glennon Doyle

129. “Whether you are brave or not cannot be judged by people on the outside. Sometimes being brave requires letting the crowd think you’re a coward. Sometimes being brave means letting everyone down but yourself.”

— Glennon Doyle

130. “If you are uncomfortable – in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused – you don’t have a problem, you have a life.”

— Glennon Doyle

131. “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

132. “Since I got sober, I have never been fine again, not for a single moment. I have been exhausted and terrified and angry. I have been overwhelmed and underwhelmed and debilitatingly depressed and anxious. I have been amazed and awed and delighted and overjoyed to bursting. I have been reminded, constantly, by the Ache: This will pass; stay close. I have been alive.”

— Glennon Doyle

133. “The norms were created by somebody, and each of us is somebody. We can make our own normal.”

— Glennon Doyle

134. “We are guided toward certain things: a pen and paper, a guitar, the forest in the backyard, a soccer ball, a spatula. The moment after we don’t know what to do with ourselves is the moment we find ourselves. Right after itchy boredom is self-discovery. But we have to hang in there long enough without bailing.”

— Glennon Doyle

135. “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

136. “Maybe we can stop trying so hard to understand the gorgeous mystery of sexuality. Instead, we can just listen to ourselves and each other with curiosity and love, and without fear. We can just let people be who they are and we can believe that the freer each person is, the better we all are. Maybe our understanding of sexuality can become as fluid as sexuality itself.”

— Glennon Doyle

137. “Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely.”

— Glennon Doyle

138. “We feel like we are always saying the wrong things and that people are always getting upset about that. But I do not think people become upset just because we say the wrong things. I think people are upset – and we are defensive, hurt, and frustrated – because we have fallen into the trap of believing that becoming racially sober is about saying the right thing instead of becoming the right thing; that showing up is based in performing instead of transforming.”

— Glennon Doyle

139. “It is difficult for a woman to be healthy in a culture that is still so very sick. It is the ultimate victory for a woman to find a way to love herself and other women while existing in a world insisting that she has no right to.”

— Glennon Doyle

140. “He was brave enough to be honest; you be brave enough to handle it. Life is hard; friends need to be safe places for each other.”

— Glennon Doyle

141. “I’m happier now. I’m not doubting myself as much, and that is making me confident and stronger, so I’m suffering less. I have noticed that it seems easier for the world to love a suffering woman than it is for the world to love a joyful, confident woman.”

— Glennon Doyle

142. “Playing dumb, weak, and silly is a disservice to yourself and to me and the world. 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. Modesty is a giggly lie. An act. A mask. A fake game. We have no time for it.”

— Glennon Doyle

143. “We are cream cheese parents because we haven’t stopped to ask: Does having the best of everything make the best people?”

— Glennon Doyle

144. “The building of the true and beautiful means the destruction of the good enough.”

— Glennon Doyle

145. “To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution.”

— Glennon Doyle

146. “I have written a book, and now I must become a commercial for the book I have written. What is the point of being a writer if I have to say words about the words I’ve already written? Do painters have to draw about their paintings?”

— Glennon Doyle

147. “The beauty industry convinces us that our thighs, frizz, skin, fingernails, lips, eyelashes, leg hair, and wrinkles are repulsive and must be covered and manipulated, so we learn to not trust the bodies we live in.”

— Glennon Doyle

148. “We are here to fully introduce ourselves, to impose ourselves and ideas and thoughts and dreams onto the world, leaving it changed forever by who we are and what we bring forth from our depths. So we cannot contort ourselves to fit into the visible order. We must unleash ourselves and watch the world reorder itself in front of our eyes.”

— Glennon Doyle

149. “What if I don’t need your permission slip because I’m already free?”

— Glennon Doyle

150. “We are mugs filled to the brim, and we keep getting bumped. If we are filled with coffee, coffee will spill out. If we are filled with tea, tea will spill out. Getting bumped is inevitable. If we want to change what spills out of us, we have to work to change what’s inside of us.”

— Glennon Doyle