Top 300 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Studies prove that the more powerful, successful, and happy a man becomes, the more people trust and like him. But the more powerful and happy a woman becomes, the less people like and trust her. So we proclaim: Women are entitled to take their rightful place!”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “The change that happens to people who really sit in their pain – whether it’s a sliver of envy lasting an hour or a canyon of grief lasting decades – it’s revolutionary. When that kind of transformation happens, it becomes impossible to fit into your old conversations or relationships or patterns or thoughts or life anymore.”

— Glennon Doyle

160. “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

161. “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

162. “What matters is what people outside the circle perceive to be happening there. What matters is not what is real, but what I can convince others is real. What matters is not how I feel inside, but how I appear to feel on the outside. How I appear to feel will determine how others feel about me. What matters is how others feel about me. So I act like someone who feels Golden.”

— Glennon Doyle

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “And what if I demand freedom not because I was “born this way” and “can’t help it” but because I can do whatever I choose to do with my love and my body from year to year, moment to moment – because I’m a grown woman who does not need any excuse to live however I want to live and love whomever I want to love?”

— Glennon Doyle

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

170. “Discontent is the nagging of the imagination. Discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you. It is still pressing, swelling, trying to get your attention by whispering: “Not this.”

— Glennon Doyle

171. “The Ache is not a flaw. The Ache is our meeting place. It’s the clubhouse of the brave. All the lovers are there. It is where you go alone to meet the world. The Ache is love.”

— Glennon Doyle

172. “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

173. “Heartbreak delivers your purpose.”

— Glennon Doyle

174. “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

175. “When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. What we need are women who are full of themselves. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn.”

— Glennon Doyle

176. “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

177. “Then I walked away and reminded myself that I was responsible for telling the truth but not for anyone’s reaction to it.”

— Glennon Doyle

178. “I’ve seen what happens out in the world and inside our relationships when women stay numb, obedient, quiet, and small. Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one. When women lose themselves, the world loses its way.”

— Glennon Doyle

179. “I find myself worrying most that when we hand our children phones we steal their boredom from them. As a result, we are raising a generation of writers who will never start writing, artists who will never start doodling, chefs who will never make a mess of the kitchen, athletes who will never kick a ball against a wall, musicians who will never pick up their aunt’s guitar and start strumming. I.”

— Glennon Doyle

180. “I want us all to grow so comfortable in our own feelings, our own knowing, our own imagination that we become more committed to our own joy, freedom, and integrity than we are to manipulating what others think of us. I want us to refuse to betray ourselves. Because what the world needs now in order to evolve is to watch one woman at a time live her truest, most beautiful life without asking for permission or offering explanation.”

— Glennon Doyle

181. “I have decided that I want to be in love with a person, not a feeling. I want to be found in love, not lost in it. I’d rather exist than disappear.”

— Glennon Doyle

182. “I am a sensitive introverted woman, which means that I love humanity but actual human beings are tricky for me. I love people but not in person.”

— Glennon Doyle

183. “I am a sensitive, introverted woman, which means that I love humanity but actual human beings are tricky for me. I love people but not in person. For example, I would die for you but not, like... meet you for coffee. I became a writer so I could stay at home alone in my pajamas, reading and writing about the importance of human connection and community.”

— Glennon Doyle

184. “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

185. “Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and consequently miss our becoming.”

— Glennon Doyle

186. “Consumer culture promises us that we can buy our way out of pain – that the reason we’re sad and angry is not that being human hurts; it’s because we don’t have those countertops, her thighs, these jeans. This is a clever way to run an economy, but it is no way to run a life.”

— Glennon Doyle

187. “I do not want my children to become people who abandon themselves to please the crowd.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

190. “It takes special bravery to honor yourself when the crowd is pressuring you not to. It’s easier just to give in. You didn’t give in to the crowd today. You stood strong in what you felt and knew. To me, that’s the greatest bravery. That’s true confidence, which means loyalty to self.”

— Glennon Doyle

191. “Ten is when we learn how to be good girls and real boys. Ten is when children begin to hide who they are in order to become what the world expects them to be.”

— Glennon Doyle

192. “A boundary is the edge of one of our root beliefs about ourselves and the world.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

194. “Our minds are excuse makers; our imaginations are storytellers. So instead of asking ourselves what’s right or wrong, we must ask ourselves: What is true and beautiful?”

— Glennon Doyle

195. “We are all bilingual. We speak the language of indoctrination, but our native tongue is the language of imagination.”

— Glennon Doyle

196. “Here is your baby. Love her at home, at the polls, in the streets. Let everything happen to her. Be near.”

— Glennon Doyle

197. “Grief shatters. If you let yourself shatter and then you put yourself back together, piece by piece, you wake up one day and realize that you have been completely reassembled.”

— Glennon Doyle

198. “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

199. “I want to fall in grown-up love. I want risky, true, scary love. I want to learn how to let my body bring me to love with an equal partner. I want that.”

— Glennon Doyle

200. “I have learned that if I want to rise, I have to sink first. I have to search for and depend upon the voice of inner wisdom instead of voices of outer approval.”

— Glennon Doyle