Top 300 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

105. “Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution. Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. I will continue to become only if I resist extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.”

— Glennon Doyle

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

112. “If constant anger is what is real in here, we must address it – both for ourselves and for the other. Because it is not kind to keep those we can’t forgive close to us and punish them forever. If we cannot forgive and move on, perhaps we need to move on first, and forgiveness will follow. Forgiveness does not mean access. We can give the other person the gift of forgiveness and ourselves the gift of safety and freedome at the very same time.”

— Glennon Doyle

113. “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

114. “The Ache was never warning me: This ends, so leave. She was saying: This ends, so stay.”

— Glennon Doyle

115. “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

116. “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

117. “Revelation must come before revolution.”

— Glennon Doyle

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

126. “What if we let ourselves feel it all? What if we decided that it is strength – not weakness – to let other people’s pain pierce us? What if we stopped our lives and the world for things that are worth stopping for? What if we raised our hands and asked, “Can we stay here for a minute? I’m not ready to run out to recess yet”.”

— Glennon Doyle

127. “Tish is sensitive, and that is her superpower. The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It’s not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that’s no badge of honor.”

— Glennon Doyle

128. “Good girls aren’t hungry, furious, or wild. All of the things that make a woman human are a good girl’s dirty secret.”

— Glennon Doyle

129. “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

130. “Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now.”

— Glennon Doyle

131. “I will never understand why people insist upon calling my cell phone. It’s such an aggressive action to take: calling someone. Each time my phone rings, I have a heart attack like my pocket’s on fire and a tiny siren is going off.”

— Glennon Doyle

132. “What the world needs is masses of women who are entirely out of control.”

— Glennon Doyle

133. “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

134. “Our memo has led us to steal from our children the one thing that will allow them to become strong people: struggle. We stay busy with the trivial while the world our children will inherit crumbles. We obsess over our kids snacks while they rehearse their own deaths in active -shooter drills at school. We agonize over their college prep while the earth melts around them. I cannot imagine that there has ever been a more overparented and underprotected generation.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

136. “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

137. “The thing that gets me thinking and questioning most deeply is a leader who warns me not to think or question.”

— Glennon Doyle

138. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

140. “I left my husband to build a life with Abby for the same reason I left booze to become a mother eighteen years ago. Because suddenly I was able to imagine a truer, more beautiful existence for myself than the one I was living. And my way of life is to dare to imagine the truest, most beautiful life, family, and world – and to then conjure up the courage to make real what I have imagined.”

— Glennon Doyle

141. “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

142. “Courage says, “I will not let the fact that I cannot do everything keep me from doing what I can.” We all want purpose and connection. Tell me what breaks your heart, and I’ll point you toward both.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

145. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “The truth is that it matters not at all what you think of my life – but it matters supremely what you think of your own. Judgment is just another cage we live in so we don’t have to feel, know, and imagine. Judgment is self-abandonment.”

— Glennon Doyle