Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes

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

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.

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

All that you are seeking is also seeking you. If you lie still, sit still, it will find you. It has been waiting for you a long time.

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.

I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.

Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.....For years we have been learning, practicing, been in training for...and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.

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

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.

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

All strong souls first go to hell before they do the healing of the world they came here for. If we are lucky, we return to help those still trapped below.

My brain has no heart, and my heart has no brain. That's why when I speak my mind, I appear heartless and when I do what's in my heart I seem thoughtless.

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

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.

If you have ever been called defiant, incorrigible, forward, cunning, insurgent, unruly, rebellious, you're on the right track.

The point of art is not simply to express ourselves, but to create an external, concrete form in which the soul of our lives can be evoked and contained.

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

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

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

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

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

Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows.

The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry.

To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.

Be wild; that is how to clear the river.

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

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

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

If you've lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.

I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.

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.

Asking the proper questions is the central action of transformation. Questions are the key that causes the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.

A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look 'cleaned up and combed' on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths.

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

It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says, 'Nothing good came of this' is not yet listening.

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.

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.

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

I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you.

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.

A runner is real when she takes the first step.

Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags and crazy people.

Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul.

Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase.

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

Mend the part of the world that is within your reach.

The soul has no gender.

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

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

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