Top 200 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Mercy and empathy are great threats to an unjust society.”

— Glennon Doyle

152. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

159. “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

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. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “Girls and women want to be liked. We want to be trusted. So we downplay our strengths to avoid threatening anyone and invoking disdain. We do not mention our accomplishments. We do not accept compliments. We temper, we qualify, and discount our opinions. We walk without swagger and we yield incessantly. We step out of the way. We say I feel like instead of I knew. We ask if our ideas make sense instead of assuming they do. We apologize for everything.”

— Glennon Doyle

170. “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

171. “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

172. “Which of my beliefs are of my own creation and which were programmed into me?”

— Glennon Doyle

173. “Parenthood is thinking: This is too much. I cannot lead them. But I will do the thing I cannot do.”

— Glennon Doyle

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “I will never promise to be this way or that way, I will only promise to show up, as I am, wherever I am. That’s it, and that’s all. People will like me or not, but being liked is not my One Thing; integrity is. 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

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

— Glennon Doyle

179. “In a culture as imbalanced as ours – in which a few hoard billions while others starve, in which wars are fought for oil, in which children are shot and killed while gun manufacturers and politicians collect the blood money – mercy, humanity, and vulnerability cannot be tolerated. Mercy and empathy are great threats to an unjust society.”

— Glennon Doyle

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

196. “Since it doesn’t use words to explain itself to me, I quit using words to explain myself to the world. This is the most revolutionary thing a woman can do: the next precise thing, one thing at a time, without asking permission or offering explanation. This way of life is thrilling.”

— 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. “It wasn’t enough for women to have equality with men; they needed equality with each other.”

— Glennon Doyle

199. “I don’t think that gayness is contagious. But I am certain that freedom is.”

— Glennon Doyle

200. “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