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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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.”

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

— Glennon Doyle

207. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

209. “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

210. “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

211. “We become the air we breathe.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “I want to fall in grown-up love. I want risky, true, scary love. I want to learn how to let my body bring me to love with an equal partner. I want that.”

— Glennon Doyle

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

225. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

227. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

231. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

236. “Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.”

— Glennon Doyle

237. “The facts were right there in front of me to see. But the truth was right there inside of me to feel.”

— Glennon Doyle

238. “I am as ancient as the earth I’m planted in and as new as my tiniest bloom. I am my own Touch Tree: strong, singular, alive. Still growing. I have everything I need, beneath me, above me, inside me. I am never gonna lose me.”

— Glennon Doyle

239. “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

240. “Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right.”

— Glennon Doyle

241. “I lost myself when I learned how to please.”

— Glennon Doyle

242. “Gotta uncover before you can recover.”

— Glennon Doyle

243. “Because people who do not suck are people who have failed, dusted themselves off, and tried again. People who do not suck are people who have been hurt, so they have empathy for others who are hurt. People who do not suck are those who have learned from their own mistakes by dealing with the consequences. People who do not suck are people who have learned how to win with humility and how to lose with dignity.”

— Glennon Doyle

244. “Rebellion is as much of a cage as obedience is. They both mean living in reaction to someone else’s way instead of forging your own. Freedom is not being for or against an ideal, but creating your own existence from scratch.”

— Glennon Doyle

245. “If you want to get jaded and numb, watch the news. If you want to stay human, read letters. When trying to understand humanity, seek out firsthand accounts.”

— Glennon Doyle

246. “I find myself worrying most that when we hand our children phones we steal their boredom from them. As a result, we are raising a generation of writers who will never start writing, artists who will never start doodling, chefs who will never make a mess of the kitchen, athletes who will never kick a ball against a wall, musicians who will never pick up their aunt’s guitar and start strumming. I.”

— Glennon Doyle

247. “A broken family is a family in which any member must break herself into pieces to fit in. A whole family is one in which each member can bring her full self to the table knowing that she will always be both held and free.”

— Glennon Doyle

248. “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

249. “But I would never again be alone in a relationship and pretend that was love. I would never again settle for a relationship or life less beautiful than the one I’d want for my child.”

— Glennon Doyle

250. “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