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Clarissa Pinkola Estés

  • 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 ...

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

  • Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength.

  • 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.

  • Stories are medicine.

  • Ritual is one of the ways in which humans put their lives in perspective, whether it be Purim, Advent, or drawing down the moon. Ritual calls together the shades and specters in people's lives, sorts them out, puts them to rest.

  • The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.

  • Long ago the word alone was treated as two words, all one. To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of solitude, to be all one.

  • 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.

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

  • Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, is fed. That is why beholding someone else's creative word, image, idea, fills us up, inspires us to our own creative work. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent. One creative act can cause a torrent to break through stone.

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

  • 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.

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

  • Tears are a river that take you somewhere. Weeping creates a river around the boat that carries your soul-life. Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace new, someplace better.

  • It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says nothing good comes of this is not yet listening.

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

  • Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots.

    • Clarissa Pinkola Estés,
    • in The New York Times Magazine ()
  • The quintessential feminine Self stands at the center of the psyche and it is wild, meaning natural and free, and utterly wise. It is not 'something' we must strive to create. This Self is already fully present, burning strong and waiting for us to come into its presence.

    • Clarissa Pinkola Estés,
    • in Women's Sports & Fitness ()
  • A woman who carries a secret is an exhausted woman.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, U.S. poet, post-trauma specialist, Jungian psychoanalyst

(1945)