Top 200 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

103. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

132. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “I thought my role was to protect Tish from pain, so I ended up teaching her that disaster was just around the corner. By shielding her constantly, I taught her how to be afraid. I taught her to hide. I taught her that she was not capable of handling what life might bring. Be careful, baby, be careful, baby, come here, honey. Mommy will protect you.”

— Glennon Doyle

139. “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

140. “There is no one way to live, love, raise children, arrange a family, run a school, a community, a nation. The norms were created by somebody, and each of us is somebody. We can make our own normal.”

— Glennon Doyle

141. “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

142. “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

143. “When I was young, I made myself feel safer by controlling my food and body. I still do that. But as I got older and became a wife and a mother, I found another thing to try to control to create safety: my people. Since life is scary and precarious, controlling people I love felt like the responsible thing to do.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

145. “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

146. “Heartbreak delivers your purpose.”

— Glennon Doyle

147. “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

148. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

150. “Why do women find it honorable to dismiss ourselves? Why do we decide that denying our longing is the responsible thing to do? Why do we believe that what will thrill and fulfill us will hurt our people?”

— Glennon Doyle