Top 300 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

205. “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

206. “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

207. “I really, really think the secret to being loved is to love. And the secret to being interesting is to be interested. And the secret to having a friend is being a friend... Be brave. Like somebody.”

— Glennon Doyle

208. “Listen. Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

210. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

212. “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

213. “What is it that affects you so deeply that whenever you encounter it, you feel the need to look away? Look there. Where is the pain in the world that you just cannot stand? Stand there. The thing that breaks your heart is the very thing you were born to help heal. Every world changer’s work begins with a broken heart.”

— Glennon Doyle

214. “Grief is a cocoon from which we emerge new.”

— Glennon Doyle

215. “We become the air we breathe.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

218. “If what I’ve found in the deep is just my self – if what I’ve learned is not how to commune with God but how to commune with myself – if who I have learned to trust is not God but myself – and if, for the rest of my life, no matter how lost I get, I know exactly where and how to find myself again – well, then. That is certainly enough of a miracle for me.”

— Glennon Doyle

219. “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

220. “God is not a being outside of me: God is the fire, the nudge, the warm liquid gold swelling and pressing inside me.”

— Glennon Doyle

221. “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

222. “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

223. “Being both depressed and anxious is a bit like being Eeyore and Tigger at the same time. It’s like always living a little too low and a little too high. It’s always struggling to be at the level where life happens, which is here and now.”

— Glennon Doyle

224. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

226. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

230. “When she becomes upset, we assume she has her own valid reason. So we say, “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

231. “Our boys are born with great potential for nurturing, caring, loving, and serving. Let’s stop training it out of them.”

— Glennon Doyle

232. “The truest, most beautiful life never promises to be an easy one. We need to let go of the lie that it’s supposed to be.”

— Glennon Doyle

233. “This is why they call it falling in love, because there is suddenly no solid ground beneath you anymore.”

— Glennon Doyle

234. “I understand now that no one else in the world knows what I should do. The experts don’t know, the ministers, the therapists, the magazines, the authors, my parents, my friends, they don’t know. Not even the folks who love me the most. Because no one has ever lived or will live this life I am attempting to live. Every life is an unprecendented experiment. This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been. There is no map. We are all pioneers.”

— Glennon Doyle

235. “Good art originates not from the desire to show off but from the desire to show yourself. Good art always comes from our desperate desire to breathe, to be seen, to be loved. In everyday life, we are used to seeing only the shiny outer layer of folks. Art makes us less lonely because it always comes from the desperate center of the artist – and each of our centers is desperate. That’s why good art is such a relief.”

— Glennon Doyle

236. “I am in the One Big Ache of lovepainbeautytendernesslonginggoodbye.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

238. “The problem is that the parts of themselves that our boys have been banished from are not feminine traits; they are human traits. 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

239. “My whole life is an apology, and that hasn’t made a damn thing better. Mary had known. She had understood: A woman doesn’t need to be told, yet again, that she’s bad. She needs to be told that she’s good.”

— Glennon Doyle

240. “All of the beliefs that anger delivers come with a return label.”

— Glennon Doyle

241. “Being fully human is not about feeling happy, it’s about feeling everything.”

— Glennon Doyle

242. “You are not crazy. You are a goddamn cheetah.”

— Glennon Doyle

243. “Girls born into a patriarchal society become either shrewd or sick. It’s one or the other.”

— Glennon Doyle

244. “I’m trying to strip myself down to my barest essentials so I can figure out where I begin and where the woman the world told me to be begins.”

— Glennon Doyle

245. “Ten minutes a day is not too long to spend finding yourself, Glennon. For God’s sake, you spend eighty minutes a day finding your keys.”

— Glennon Doyle

246. “You are a human being, and your birthright is to remain fully human. So you get to be everything: loud quiet bold smart careful impulsive creative joyful big angry curious ravenous ambitious. You are allowed to take up space on this earth with your feelings, your ideas, your body. You do not need to shrink. You do not need to hide any part of yourself, ever.”

— Glennon Doyle

247. “My sister interrupted me and said, “Glennon, why are you so defensive? Defensiveness is for people who are afraid that what they have can be taken from them. You are a grown-ass woman. You can have what you want. No one can take this from you. Not even Mom. This is yours, Glennon. Abby is yours.”

— Glennon Doyle

248. “The moment after we don’t know what to do with ourselves is the moment we find ourselves.”

— Glennon Doyle

249. “What if we revised our memo? What if we decided that successful parenting includes working to make sure that all kids have enough, not just that the particular kids assigned to us have everything? What if we used our mothering love less like a laser, burning holes into the children assigned to us, and more like the sun, making sure all kids are warm?”

— Glennon Doyle

250. “I know that when the pain and the waiting are here, the rising is on its way. I hope the pain will pass soon, but I’ll wait it out because I’ve tested pain enough to trust it. And because who I will become tomorrow is so unforeseeable and specific that I’ll need every bit of today’s lessons to become her.”

— Glennon Doyle