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

— Glennon Doyle

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

210. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

213. “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

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 see your fear, and it’s big. I also see your courage and it’s bigger. We can do hard things, baby. We are fireproof.”

— Glennon Doyle

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

227. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

229. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

231. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

233. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

240. “All the love in the world cannot move a boulder, because the Removal is not between the impeded and the ones who love her. The Removal is strictly between the impeded one and her God.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

242. “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

243. “I will not stay, not ever again – in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself.”

— Glennon Doyle

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “We obsess over our children’s 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

249. “I am a woman who has learned repeatedly that while rock bottom feels like the end – it’s always the beginning of something.”

— Glennon Doyle

250. “Yes, everyone you love would be uncomfortable for a long while, maybe. What is better: uncomfortable truth or comfortable lies? Every truth is a kindness, even if it makes others uncomfortable. Every untruth is an unkindness, even if it makes others comfortable.”

— Glennon Doyle