Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many beginnings-all in the same relationship.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

So, the word wild here is not used in its modern pejorative sense, meaning out of control, but in its original sense, which means to live a natural life, one in which the creature, creature, has innate integrity and healthy boundaries. These words, wild and woman, cause women to remember who they are and what they are about. They create a metaphor to describe the force which funds all females. They personify a force that women cannot live without.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Stories are medicine. I have been taken with stories since I heard my first. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act, anything -- we need only listen.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing Willis women.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to protect, contain, support and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling - that is the supreme psychic nourishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight. It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit. The body is the launcher of those experiences. Without body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, there would be no sense of lifting, no sense of height, weightlessness. All that comes from the body. The body is the rocket launcher. In its nose capsule, the soul looks out the window into the mysterious starry night and is dazzled.

— 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