Top 200 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “As every architect or designer knows, there is a critical step between vision and reality. Before imagination becomes three-dimensional, it usually needs to become two-dimensional. It’s as though the unseen order needs to come to life one dimension at a time.”

— Glennon Doyle

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “Heartbreak delivers your purpose.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

174. “Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you’re there because you hit a triple. Malicious privilege is complaining that those starving outside the ballpark aren’t waiting patiently enough.”

— Glennon Doyle

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “We become the air we breathe.”

— Glennon Doyle

180. “I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy.”

— Glennon Doyle

181. “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

182. “When women write to me in the language of indoctrination – when they use words like good and should and right and wrong – I try to speak back to them in the language of imagination.”

— Glennon Doyle

183. “I see that you’re upset. Are you ready for a solution yet? Or do you just need to feel this way for a while?”

— Glennon Doyle

184. “What many tell me is that they harbor an achy, heavy hunch that their lives, relationships, and world were meant to be more beautiful than they are.”

— Glennon Doyle

185. “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

186. “My only expectation is that you become yourself. The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me. If someone tells you who they are, consider how lucky you are to be graced with that gift. Don’t respond with an eviction notice, a permission slip, or a concession speech. Un-God yourself. Gasp in awe and applaud with gusto.”

— Glennon Doyle

187. “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

188. “Femininity” is just a set of human characteristics a culture pours into a bucket and slaps with the label “feminine.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— 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 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

192. “There is no glory except straight through your story.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

199. “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

200. “I want to be found in love, not lost in it.”

— Glennon Doyle