Top 300 Glennon Doyle Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Our children are too vast to fit themselves inside these rigid, mass-produced bottles. But they’ll lose themselves trying.”

— Glennon Doyle

252. “I’ve got these conditions – anxiety, depression, addiction –and they almost killed me. But they are also my superpowers. The sensitivity that led me to addiction is the same sensitivity that makes me a really good artist. The anxiety that makes it difficult to exist in a world where so many people are in so much pain – and that makes me a relentless activist. The fire that burned me up for the first half of my life is the exact same fire I’m using now to light up the world.”

— Glennon Doyle

253. “Perhaps imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

255. “I will not stay, not ever again – in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself. When my body tells me the truth, I’ll believe it. I trust myself now, so I will no longer suffer voluntarily or silently or for long.”

— Glennon Doyle

256. “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

257. “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

258. “It’s okay to feel all of the stuff you’re feeling. You’re just becoming human again. You’re not doing life wrong; you’re doing it right. If there’s any secret you’re missing, it’s that doing it right is just really hard. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even hard ones. The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes.”

— Glennon Doyle

259. “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

260. “Brave means living from the inside out. Brave means, in every uncertain moment, turning inward, feeling for the Knowing, and speaking it out loud.”

— Glennon Doyle

261. “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

262. “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

263. “I think the only way to convince anybody you are okay is just to go about being okay and let them witness it.”

— Glennon Doyle

264. “Having such little faith in myself that I numb or hide or consume my way out of my fiery feelings again and again.”

— Glennon Doyle

265. “I think we are only bitter about other people’s joy in direct proportion to our commitment to keep joy from ourselves.”

— Glennon Doyle

266. “Does having the best of everything make the best people?”

— Glennon Doyle

267. “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

268. “Blessed are those brave enough to make things awkward, for they wake us up and move us forward.”

— Glennon Doyle

269. “She remembers. She remembers that even though I can’t know what will come next in my life, I always know what comes next in the process. 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

270. “It’s not the cruel criticism from folks who hate us that scares us away from our Knowing; it’s the quiet concern of those who love us.”

— Glennon Doyle

271. “I’m willing to lose anything that requires me to hide any part of myself.”

— Glennon Doyle

272. “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

273. “Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes.”

— Glennon Doyle

274. “There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.”

— Glennon Doyle

275. “Family is: Whether we’re falling or flying, we’re going to take care of each other through the whole damn ride.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

278. “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

279. “Pain is not tragic. Pain is magic. Suffering is tragic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and consequently miss our own becoming. That is what I can and must avoid: missing my own evolution because I am too afraid to surrender to the process.”

— Glennon Doyle

280. “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

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

— Glennon Doyle

282. “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

283. “I decided to let my family’s form become an evolving ecosystem. I unbecame a woman clinging to a prescribed family structure and became one clinging to each of her family member’s right to their full humanity: including me. We would break and rebreak our structure instead of allowing any of us to live broken.”

— Glennon Doyle

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

— Glennon Doyle

285. “I surrendered myself to the cages of others’ expectations, cultural mandates and institutional allegiances. Until I buried who I was in order to become what I should be. I lost myself when I learned how to please.”

— Glennon Doyle

286. “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

287. “We need their science because they need our poetry. We don’t need to be more pleasant, normal, or convenient, we just need to be ourselves. We need to save ourselves because we need to save the world.”

— Glennon Doyle

288. “Maybe Eve was never meant to be our warning. Maybe she was meant to be our model. Own your wanting. Eat the apple. Let it burn.”

— Glennon Doyle

289. “If this is our shared human experience, where did we get the idea that there is some other, better, more perfect, unbroken way to be human? Where is the human being who is functioning “correctly,” against whom we are all judging our performances? Who is she? Where is she? What is her life if it is not these things?”

— Glennon Doyle

290. “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

291. “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

292. “Be careful with the stories you tell about yourself”.”

— Glennon Doyle

293. “The voice I finally heard that day was my own – the girl I’d locked away at ten years old, the girl I was before the world told me who to be – and she said: Here I am. I’m taking over now.”

— Glennon Doyle

294. “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

295. “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

296. “The culture depends on the sensitivity of a few, because nothing can be healed if it’s not sensed first.”

— Glennon Doyle

297. “It’s nearly impossible to blaze one’s own path while following in someone else’s footsteps.”

— Glennon Doyle

298. “We must be committed to holding on to nothing but the truth. We must decide that if the truth inside us can burn a belief, a family structure, a business, a religion, an industry – it should have become ashes yesterday.”

— Glennon Doyle

299. “There is another kind of pain that comes not from losing beautiful things but from never even trying for them.”

— Glennon Doyle

300. “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