Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes

To love a woman, the mate must also love her wildish nature.

Holy Mother is not meant to be a fence: Holy Mother is a Gate.

The body is like the earth ... as vulnerable to overbuilding, being carved into parcels, cut off, overmined, and shorn of its power as any landscape.

Talking is the voice of human, singing is the voice of soul.

Wild Woman teaches women when not to act "nice" about protecting their soulful lives.

Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.

Stories are medicine.

The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life.

Mystery can be overwhelming. Touching Divinity can seem like all one's atoms composing mind and body have suddenly been rearranged.

It's not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate.

Wild Women: "They know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away, they know how to stay.

Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.

At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again. In that sense, hitting bottom, while extremely painful, is also the sowing ground.

Many of us have lived desert lives: very small on the surface, and enormous under the ground.

Story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community.

We can see that for the deep work to continue, trying to prove one's worth to the chorus of jealous hags is pointless.

Go. Go right now, and as soon, and as often as you can. Keep going.

Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.

To love pleasure takes little. To love truly takes a hero who can manage his own fear.

When you feel bad, find a person to talk to and cry with, to tell of your anger and other helpless feelings.

It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.

She must be willing to feel anxious sometimes, otherwise she might as well have stayed in the nest. Sometimes

To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.

Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.

Nature does not ask permission. Blossom and birth whenever you feel like it.

If you have yet to be called an incorrigable, defiant woman,
don't worry, there is still time

We wish to make rage into a fire that cooks things rather than a fire of conflagration.

If logic was anything, all men would ride sidesaddles..

Just because a woman is silent does not mean she agrees.

Nurture is like psychic Wheaties.

Sometimes there are no words to help one's courage. Sometimes you just have to jump.

The only trust required is to know that when there is one ending there will be another beginning.

Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer ... and on the reader.

There is an integrity to story that comes from a real life lived in it. A story is clearly illumined from being raised up in it. In

Dogs are the magicians of the universe.

I was an aesthete rather than an athlete, and my only wish was to be an ecstatic wanderer.

A runner is real when she takes the first step.

If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman ... have faith. There is yet time.

This wolf-woman Self must have freedom to move, to speak, to be angry, and to create.

That sort of overintellectualization obscures the patterns of the Wild Woman and the instinctual nature of women.

Night is when we are closer to ourselves, closer to essential ideas and feelings that do not register so much during daylight hours.

Since time out of mind, a considered act of heroism has been the cure for stultifying ambivalence.

The deterioration of symbols is natural. They wear out, needing to be reclaimed, recreated; returned to the spirit.

Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity.

Our own sorrows seem heavy enough, even when lifted by certain long-term joys. But watching others hurt is the breaker of most any heart.

Stories that rise from deep suffering can provide the most potent remedies for past, present, and even future ills.

A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.

I have to go to the woods, and I have to meet the wolf, or else my life will never begin.

Be proud of your scars. They have everything to do with your strength, and what you've endured. They're a treasure map to the deep self.

I became married at a young age and had two daughters and divorced at 26. I had to go on welfare to make ends meet. I had no way to support myself.

Tears are a river that takes you somewhere ... Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.

Artfulness is not simple entertainment,
especially during upheaval,
unleashing creative life is sacred duty.

Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.

Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered ...

When seeking guidance, don't ever listen to the tiny-hearted. Be kind to them, heap them with blessing, cajole them, but do not follow their advice.

Unfurl the bandages, ready the medicine. Let us return now, wild women howling, laughing, singing up The One who loves us.

A woman must be able to stand in the face of power, because ultimately some part of that power will become hers.

When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.

Even in the best of worlds the soul needs refurbishing from time to time.

Rather than chairs and tables, I preferred the ground, trees, and caves, for in those places I felt I could lean against the cheek of God.

The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar.

I am built close to the ground and of extravagant body.

We all wish to be brave and strong in the face of disaster. We all wish to be looked up to for our endurance and efforts to help others.

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

When you focus with soul eyes, / You will see home in many, many places.

For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.

The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead.

The soul has no gender.

So, let us push on now, and remember ourselves back to the wild soul. Let us sing her flesh back onto our bones.

Even if one has friends, those friends may not be suns.

Remember, if logic were all there really was to the world, then surely all men would ride sidesaddle

Any time I find medicine that's helpful, I share it with everyone I know.

There is no one a wildish woman loves better than a mate who can be her equal.

To take the world into one's arms and act towards it in a soul-filled and soul-strengthening manner is a powerful act of wildish spirit.

Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world.

Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on.