All creatures must learn that there exist predators. Without this knowing, a woman will be unable to negotiate safely within her own forest without being devoured. To understand the predator is to become a mature animal who is not vulnerable out of naïveté, inexperience, or foolishness.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Another way to strengthen connection to intuition is to refuse to allow anyone to repress your vivid energies... that means your opinions, your thoughts, your ideas, your values, your morals, your ideals. There is very little right/wrong or good/bad in this world. There is, however, use and not useful.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

As a woman lives them, she will understand more and more of these interior feminine rhythms, among them the rhythms of creativity, or birthing psychic babies and perhaps also human ones, the rhythms of solitude, of play, of rest, of sexuality, and of the hunt.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

A woman must choose her friends and lovers wisely, for both can become like a bad stepmother and rotten stepsisters. In the case of our lovers, we often invest them with the power of a great Mage - a great magician. This is easy to do, for if we become truly intimate, it dislikes unlocking a lead crystal atelier, a magic one, or so it feels to us. A lover can engender and/or destroy even our most durable connections to our own cycle and ideas. The destructive lover must be avoided. A better sort of lover is one finely wrought of strong psychic muscle and tender flesh. For Wild Woman it also helps if the lover is just a bit psychic too, a person who can "see into" her heart.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

A woman's issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture, nor can she be bent into a more intellectually acceptable shape by those who claim to be the sole bearers of consciousness. No, that is what has already caused millions of women who began as strong and natural powers to become outsiders in their own cultures.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Being real doesn't mean being reckless, it means allowing La VOZ Biological, The Mythological Voice, to speak. One does that by shutting off the ego for a while and letting that which wishes to speak, speak.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Dogs are the magicians of the universe.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés