Glennon Doyle is an author and activist known for her brilliant wisdom, brave storytelling, and bold activism. And, if you know us at Good Good Good, you know we love an incredible storyteller and activist who inspires us to celebrate the good and put even more good into the world.
Her books "Love Warrior," "Carry On, Warrior," and "Untamed" have become powerful manifestos for people around the globe working through pain and heartbreak to find freedom and empowerment — including Oprah, Brené Brown, Adele, and her very cool soccer player wife, Abby Wambach.
Glennon also runs a nonprofit called Together Rising with her sister, Amanda Doyle, and they have raised millions of dollars to support refugees, immigrant family reunification, and everyday American people who need help from their communities.
Her podcast "We Can Do Hard Things" combines Glennon's seemingly endless insight with brilliant research and lived experience from experts on topics like infidelity, sexuality, creativity, boundaries, and much more.
Read some of Glennon's many inspiring words of wisdom below:
The Best Glennon Doyle Quotes
Famous Quotes
“I’m not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, ‘For the same reason I laugh so often — because I'm paying attention.’ I tell them that we can choose to be perfect and admired or to be real and loved. We must decide.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyway.”
— Glennon Doyle
“If you ask a woman who she is, she’ll tell you who she serves and sometimes what she does. But that isn’t the whole story.”
— Glennon Doyle
“You are not here to waste your time deciding whether my life is true and beautiful enough for you. You are here to decide if your life, relationships, and world are true and beautiful enough for you.”
— Glennon Doyle
“The building of the true and beautiful means the destruction of the good enough.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
— Glennon Doyle
“What if love is not the process of disappearing for the beloved but of emerging for the beloved? What if a mother’s responsibility is teaching her children that love does not lock the lover away but frees her? What if a responsible mother is not one who shows her children how to slowly die but how to stay wildly alive until the day she dies? What if the call of motherhood is not to be a martyr but to be a model?”
— Glennon Doyle
On Doing Hard Things
“We can do hard things.”
— Glennon Doyle
“What I thought would kill me, didn’t. Every time I said to myself: I can’t take this anymore — I was wrong. The truth was that I could and did take it all — and I kept surviving. Surviving again and again made me less afraid of myself, of other people, of life.”
— Glennon Doyle
“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
On Life
“Life is a conversation. Make it a good one.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Here’s my hunch — nobody’s secure, and nobody feels like she completely belongs. Those insecurities are just job hazards of being human. But some people dance anyway, and those people have more fun.”
— Glennon Doyle
“This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been.”
— Glennon Doyle
“To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. 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.”
— Glennon Doyle
“We are here to fully introduce ourselves, to impose ourselves and ideas and thoughts and dreams onto the world, leaving it changed forever by who we are and what we bring forth from our depths. So we cannot contort ourselves to fit into the visible order. We must unleash ourselves and watch the world reorder itself in front of our eyes.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Life is hard — not because we’re doing it wrong, just because it’s hard.”
— Glennon Doyle
→ Read more quotes about life
Quotes From Untamed
“You are here to decide if your life, relationships, and world are true and beautiful enough for you. And if they are not and you dare to admit they are not, you must decide if you have the guts, the right — perhaps even the duty — to burn to the ground that which is not true and beautiful enough and get started building what is.”
— Glennon Doyle
“The braver I am, the luckier I get.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Perhaps imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Here’s to the Untamed: May we know them. May we raise them. May we love them. May we read them. May we elect them. May we be them.”
— Glennon Doyle
On Love
“I think of love and marriage in the same way I do plants — We have perennials and annuals. The perennial plant blooms, goes away, and comes back. The annual blooms for just a season, and then winter arrives and takes it out for good. But it's still enriched the soil for the next flower to bloom. In the same way, no love is wasted.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Trusting people is terrifying. Maybe if love is not a little scary and out of our control, then it is not love at all. It is wild to let others be wild.”
— Glennon Doyle
“The only meaningful thing we can offer one another is love. Not advice, not questions about our choices, not suggestions for the future, just love.”
— Glennon Doyle
“To me, intimacy is about communication. Through the written or spoken or physically expressed word, communicating is how we get into each other’s hearts and minds.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Because love is not something for which to search or wait or hope or dream. It’s simply something to do.”
— Glennon Doyle
“You do not have to agree with me to love me.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world — ‘Look! Love was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.’”
“The amazing thing about love and attention and encouragement and grace and success and joy is that these things are infinite. We get a new supply every single morning, and so we can give it away all day. We never, ever have to monitor the supply of others or grab or hoard.”
— Glennon Doyle
On Pain
“Pain is mandatory for all of us. It’s what teaches us. Suffering is what's optional. That's what happens when we try to skip over the pain.”
— Glennon Doyle
“You can be shattered, and then you can put yourself back together piece by piece. But what can happen over time is this: You wake up one day and realize that you have put yourself back together completely differently. That you are whole, finally, and strong — but you are now a different shape, a different size.”
— Glennon Doyle
“If you are uncomfortable — in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused — you don’t have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right.”
— Glennon Doyle
“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
On Friendship
“It is a blessing to know a free woman. Sometimes she will stop by and hold up a mirror for you. She will help you remember who you are.”
— Glennon Doyle
“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
“People who are hurting don’t need avoiders, protectors, or fixers. What we need are patient, loving witnesses. People to sit quietly and hold space for us. People to stand in helpful vigil to our pain.”
— Glennon Doyle
On Parenting
“Life is not safe, and so our task is not to promise our kids there will be no turbulence. It’s to assure them that when the turbulence comes, we will all hold hands and get through it together.”
— Glennon Doyle
“A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter.”
— Glennon Doyle
“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
“There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.”
— Glennon Doyle
“My children do not need me to save them. My children need to watch me save myself.”
— Glennon Doyle
“What if parenting became less about telling our children who they should be and more about asking them again and again forever who they already are? Then, when they tell us, we would celebrate instead of concede. It’s not: I love you no matter which of my expectations you meet or don’t meet. It’s: My only expectation is that you become yourself. The more deeply I know you, the more beautiful you become to me.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Don’t let yourself become so concerned with raising a good kid that you forget you already have one.”
— Glennon Doyle
On Activism
“Freedom is not being for or against an ideal, but creating your own existence from scratch.”
— Glennon Doyle
“An activist is anybody who, inside their life, family, or community, sees something that needs to change and acts on it.”
— Glennon Doyle
“If you sit with what pisses you off and breaks your heart, that will be a big red arrow pointing you towards purpose.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Freedom is not being for or against an ideal, but creating your own existence from scratch.”
— Glennon Doyle
“We are all bilingual. We speak the language of indoctrination, but our native tongue is the language of imagination.”
— Glennon Doyle
“I stopped being a quiet peacekeeper and started being a loud peacemaker. My anger was good.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Change is incremental, and it is sometimes quiet. And it is happening. I promise you it is happening.”
— Glennon Doyle
“Maybe we do not need all the answers today. Maybe today, we need only reach deeply within ourselves, see and affirm our undeniable dignity, and reaffirm a resolute commitment: We will never give up, We will never go away.”
— Glennon Doyle
You might also like: The best quotes about activism — from activists
On Self Love
“Your body is not your art — it's your paintbrush. Whether your paintbrush is a tall paintbrush or a thin paintbrush or a stocky paintbrush or a scratched-up paintbrush is completely irrelevant.”
— Glennon Doyle
“I will not stay, not ever again — in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself.”
— Glennon Doyle
“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
“Be careful with the stories you tell about yourself.”
— Glennon Doyle
“The only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me.”
— Glennon Doyle
“I have met myself and I am going to care for her fiercely.”
— Glennon Doyle
You might also like: The best quotes about self-love
