Top 200 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

155. “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

156. “Heartbreak delivers your purpose.”

— Glennon Doyle

157. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

165. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

176. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

188. “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

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

— 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. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “We become the air we breathe.”

— Glennon Doyle

195. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

197. “I burned the memo that defined selflessness as the pinnacle of womanhood, but first I forgave myself for believing that lie for so long.”

— Glennon Doyle

198. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

200. “I burned the memo that defined selflessness as the pinnacle of womanhood, but first I forgave myself for believing that lie for so long. I had abandoned myself out of love. They’d convinced me that the best way for a woman to love her partner, family, and community was to lose herself in service to them.”

— Glennon Doyle