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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “Heartbreak delivers your purpose.”

— Glennon Doyle

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

175. “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

176. “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

177. “I began to insist on my right and responsibility to feel it all, even when taking the time for feeling made me a little less efficient, a little less convenient, a little less pleasant.”

— Glennon Doyle

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

189. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

195. “You’ll never be forced to hide or act in order to keep people if you don’t hide or act to get them.”

— Glennon Doyle

196. “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

197. “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

198. “To be brave is to forsake all others to be true to yourself.”

— Glennon Doyle

199. “Maybe we are all fire wrapped in skin, trying to look cool.”

— Glennon Doyle

200. “The boys looked inside themselves. The girls looked outside themselves. We forgot how to know when we learned how to please.”

— Glennon Doyle