Quote of the Day

I don't want to cover up anymore.  Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, not my dreams, not my struggles . . . Nothing.

-- Alicia Keys

Quote of the Day

Now I understand what the fuss is all about.  Mona Lisa is the patron saint of honest, resolute, fully human women -- women who feel and who know.  She is saying for us: Don't tell me to smile.  I will not be pleasant.  Even trapped here, inside two dimensions, you will see the truth.  You will see my life's brutal and beautiful right here on my face.  The world will not be able to stop staring.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 96-97

Quote of the Day

Everywhere I looked in Paris, I found proof that leaders come and go, buildings are built and fall, revolutions begin and end; nothing -- no matter how grand -- lasts.  Paris says: We are here for such a short time.  We might as well sit down for a long while with some good coffee, company, and bread.  Here, there is more time to be human, maybe because there has been more time to learn how.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 96

Quote of the Day

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.  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, Untamed, p. 93

Quote of the Day

In my thirties ... I quit trying to be the perfect woman and decided to "celebrate my imperfection."  I claimed a new identity: Jacked-Up Human!  I announced to anyone who would listen, "I'm a hot mess and proud of it!  I love this crappy version of humanity that I am!  I am broken and beautiful!!  Eff you, Perfect Woman!"  The problem was that I still believed that there was an ideal human and that I was not her ... I had just decided to live in defiance of perfection instead of in pursuit of it.  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, Untamed, p. 91-92

Quote of the Day

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, Untamed, p. 75-76

Quote of the Day

I've seen what happens out in the world and inside our relationships when women stay numb, obedient, quiet, and small.  Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one.  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.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 75

Quote of the Day

For a long while I contorted myself to live according to a set of old memos I'd been issued about how to become a successful woman and build a strong family, career, and faith.  I thought those memos were universal Truth, so I abandoned myself to honor them without even unearthing and examining them.  When I finally pulled them out of my subconscious and looked hard at them: I learned that these memos had never been Truth at all -- just my particular culture's arbitrary expectations.  Hustling to comply with my memos, I was flying on autopilot, routed to a destination I never chose.  So I took back the wheel.  I quit abandoning myself to honor those memos.  Instead, I abandoned the memos and began honoring myself.  I began to live as a woman who never got the world's memos.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 74-75

Quote of the Day

When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 56

Quote of the Day

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.  Consuming keeps us distracted, busy, and numb.  Numbness keeps us from becoming.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 51

Quote of the Day

Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 51

Quote of the Day

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.  I learned that I'd never be free from pain but I could be free from the fear of pain, and that was enough.  I finally stopped avoiding fires long enough to let myself burn, and what I learned was that I am like that burning bush: The fire of pain won't consume me.  I can burn and burn and live.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 51

Quote of the Day

... a kind woman revealed to me that being fully human is not about feeling happy, it's about feeling everything.  From that day forward, I began to practice feeling it all.  I began to insist upon my right and responsibility to feel it all, even when taking the time and energy for feeling made me a little less efficient, a little less convenient, a little less pleasant.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 50

Quote of the Day

Our society is so hell-bent on expansion, power, and efficiency at all costs that the folks like [my daughter] Tish -- like me -- are inconvenient.  We slow the world down.  We're on the bow of the Titanic, pointing, crying out, "Iceberg!  Iceberg!" while everyone else is below deck, yelling back, "We just want to keep dancing!"  It is easier to call us broken and dismiss us than to consider that we are responding appropriately to a broken world.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 16

Quote of the Day

The opposite of sensitive is not brave.  It's not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine.  The opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that's no badge of honor.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 15

Quote of the Day

To heal was to be familiar with what destroyed.

-- Ray Young Bear

Quote of the Day

Over time, I walked away from my cages.  I slowly built ... a new worldview, a new purpose, a new family, and a new identity by design instead of default.  From my imagination instead of my indoctrination.

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 6

Quote of the Day

I looked hard at my faith, my friendships, my work, my sexuality, my entire life and asked: How much of this was my idea?  Do I truly want any of this, or is this what I was conditioned to want?  Which of my beliefs are of my own creation and which were programmed into me?  How much of who I've become is inherent, and how much was just inherited?  How much of the way I look and speak and behave is just how other people have trained me to look and speak and behave? ... Who was I before I became who the world told me to be?

-- Glennon Doyle, Untamed, p. 6