Clarissa Pinkola Estés Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

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.

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.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Of course fashion matters. 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
For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
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.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
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.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
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.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
For women, tears are the beginning of initiation into the Scar Clan, that timeless tribe of women of all colors, all nations, all languages, who down through the ages have lived through a great something, and yet who stood proud, still stand proud.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
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.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
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.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
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.

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

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

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
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.

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

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
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.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés