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

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: January 27
Poet
Psychologist
Writer
Indiana
United States
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Power
Anything
Need
Needs
Require
Medicine
Listen
Stories

More quotes by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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So, let us push on now, and remember ourselves back to the wild soul. Let us sing her flesh back onto our bones.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate and their pack. Yet both have been hounded, harassed and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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I became married at a young age and had two daughters and divorced at 26. I had to go on welfare to make ends meet. I had no way to support myself.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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Be wild that is how to clear the river.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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Some say that sudden knowledge of mystical matters is accomplished only in complete quietude, or that Creator, in one of God's many forms, appears only in orderly ways that are beauteous and picturesque, or that the mystical appears only in completely silent ways. All are true. Except for the 'only' part.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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Wolves never look more funny than when they have lost the scent and scrabble to find it again: they hop in the air they run in circles, they plow up the ground with their noses . . . .
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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The deterioration of symbols is natural. They wear out, needing to be reclaimed, recreated returned to the spirit.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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To be poor and be without trees, is to be the most starved human being in the world. To be poor and have trees, is to be completely rich in ways that money can never buy.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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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 Estes
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Suppose... the body is a God in its own right, a teacher, a mentor, a certified guide? Then what? .... Are we strong enough to refute the party line and listen deep, listen true to the body as a powerful and holy being?
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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A lover cannot be chosen a la smorgasbord. A lover has to be chosen from soul-craving. To choose just because something mouthwatering stands before ou will never satisfy the hunger of the soul-self. And that is what the intuition is for it is the direct messenger of the soul.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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Story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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When a creature is exposed to violence, it will tend to adapt to that disturbance, so that when the violence ceases or the creature is allowed its freedom, the healthy instinct to flee is hugely diminished, and the creature stays put instead.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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The body is like the earth ... as vulnerable to overbuilding, being carved into parcels, cut off, overmined, and shorn of its power as any landscape.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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We practice conscious forgetting by refusing to summon up the fiery material, we refuse to recollect. To forget is an active, not a passive, endeavor. It means to not haul up certain materials, or turn them over and over, to not work oneself up by repetitive thought, picture, or emotion.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes