Could gravitational waves open the door to observe quantum gravity? In this talk I provide an initial answer, and show that results are quite promising. Recent developments in the effective field theory of quantum gravity uncovered the low-energy structure of the effective action in curved space. The long-distance portion of quantum loops manifests in a set of parameter-free non-local operators, which are fully captured by the effective theory. I quantify the effects of these non-local corrections on the gravitational radiation emitted by a binary source. I present a self-consistent perturbative method to solve the non-local theory, that crucially admits a causal prescription to be imposed on the wave solutions. I employ a tensor-vector-scalar decomposition of the metric perturbations to reveal the propagating gauge-invariant degrees of freedom. The central results show that quantum gravity inevitably excites the four modes of metric perturbations which are pure gauge in general relativity, namely the transverse vector and scalar modes. I compute the waveforms of the extra propagating modes, in addition to the modification to the transverse-traceless metric perturbations. The new modes have mass and travel with sub-luminal group velocity.