Estes Quotes & Sayings

As long as a woman is forced into believing she is powerless and/or is trained to not consciously register what she knows to be true, the feminine impulses and gifts of her psyche continue to be killed off. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

There is an integrity to story that comes from a real life lived in it. A story is clearly illumined from being raised up in it. In — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction ... It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirits, the pit at the center, and rising hope. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

As they say, with great power comes great responsibility."
"Are you screwin' with me, man?" Taylor asked bluntly. — David Estes

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

Unfurl the bandages, ready the medicine. Let us return now, wild women howling, laughing, singing up The One who loves us. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Story cannot be "studied." It is learned through assimilation, through living in its proximity with those who know it, live it, and teach it - more so through all the day-to-day mundane tasks of life, much more than the clearly ceremonial times. The — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Japanese researchers blindfolded a group of students and told them their right arms were being rubbed with a poison ivy plant. Afterward, all 13 of the students' arms reacted with the classic symptoms of poison ivy: itching, boils, and redness. Not surprising until you find out that the plant used for the study wasn't poison ivy at all, just a harmless shrub. The students' beliefs were actually strong enough to create the biological effects of poison ivy, even though no such plant had touched them. Then, on the students' other arm, the researchers rubbed actual poison ivy, but told them it was a harmless plant. Even though all 13 students were highly allergic, only two of them broke out into the poison ivy rash! — Chris Estes

It's like my mind knows to stay as far away from him as possible ... but my bones, my skin quiver in his presence. — David Estes

This isn't about redemption ... This is about family. — David Estes

And then there are the cravings.. Oh, la! A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows.
She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she doesn't dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

To call up modern versions of the old stories, one has to go forth and live life. As a result then, one will have the challenge of not only living the story, taking it all in, but also interpreting it in whatever ways are useful. So too, one will reap the reward of telling all about it afterward. One's interest in the world, and in having experiences, is really an interest in hearing, having, living one more story, and then one more, then one more story, till one cannot live them out loud any longer. Perhaps it should be said that the drive to live out stories is as deep in the psyche, when awakened, as it is compelling to the psyche to listen to stories and learn from them.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. in Introduction to the 2004 edition of The hero with a thousand faces (J.Campbell) — Joseph Campbell

Words can split logs and start fires and break stones, but they can also hug you and warm you and fight the wars you don't have the strength to fight. — David Estes

El duende is literally the goblin wind or force behind a person's actions and creative life, including the way they walk, the sound of their voice, even the way they lift their little finger. It is a term used in flamenco dance, and is also used to describe the ability to "think" in poetic images. Among Latina curanderas who recollect story, it is understood as the ability to be filled with spirit that is more than one's own spirit. Whether one is the artist or whether one is the watcher, listener, or reader, when el duende is present, one sees it, hears it, reads it, feels it underneath the dance, the music, the words, the art; one knows it is there. When el duende is not present, one knows that too. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Wild Women: "They know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away, they know how to stay. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

All the "not readies," all the "I need time," are understandable, but only for a short while. The truth is that there is never a "completely ready," there is never a really "right time."
As with any descent to the unconscious, there comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches one's nose, and jumps into the abyss. If this were not so, we would not have needed to create the words heroine, hero, or courage. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

Halloween shadows played upon the walls of the houses. In the sky the Halloween moon raced in and out of the clouds. The Halloween wind was blowing, not a blasting of wind but a right-sized swelling, falling, and gushing of wind. It was a lovely and exciting night, exactly the kind of night Halloween should be. — Eleanor Estes

When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, an inspiratrice, an intuitive, a maker, a creator, an inventor, and a listener who guide, suggest, and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer world. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Anything you do from the soulful self will help lighten the burdens of the world. Anything. You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity, can cause to be set in motion ... Mend the part of the world that is within your reach. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

He throws his hands up in a request for mercy, I'm not in the mood so I stab him in the heart. — David Estes

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

Even in the best of worlds the soul needs refurbishing from time to time. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

My nose!" he screams, blood gushing between his fingers. "She broke my freakin' nose!"
A rush of pride courses through me. That's my girlfriend. — David Estes

All strong souls first go to hell before they do the healing of the world they came here for. If we are lucky, we return to help those still trapped below. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Sometimes in life, you just have to bend over. — Jeri Estes

Tell the truth about your wound, and then you will get a truthful picture of the remedy to apply to it. Don't pack whatever is easiest or most available into the emptiness. Hold out for the right medicine. You will recognize it because it makes your life stronger rather than weaker. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

My brain is telling me to stop staring at him, but for some reason I can't. It's almost ... instinct ... to keep on looking at him. — David Estes

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

No Latina woman would be called 'Ms.' - that's an invention of middle-class Anglo women. Latina women are proud to be called 'Mrs.' That simply means that we have a family. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

This explosive psychological 'sneaking' occurs when a woman suppresses large parts of self into the shadows of the psyche. In the view of analytical psychology, the repression of both negative and positive instincts, urges, and feelings into the unconscious causes them to inhabit a shadow realm. While the ego and superego attempt to continue to censor the shadow impulses, the very pressure that repression causes is rather like a bubble in the sidewall of a tire. Eventually, as the tire revolves and heats up, the pressure behind the bubble intensifies, causing it to explode outward, releasing all the inner content.
The shadow acts similarlyY We find that by opening the door to the shadow realm a little, and letting out various elements a few at a time, relating to them, finding use for them, negotiating, we can reduce being surprised by shadow sneak attacks and unexpected explosions. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

It sickens me that humans, who are capable of such goodness and love, can also be the tools of horrifying atrocities, as if possessed by the very demons they claim to hate and fear. — David Estes

I was an aesthete rather than an athlete, and my only wish was to be an ecstatic wanderer. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Sometimes it's best to hide in plain sight. — David Estes

Nature does not ask permission. Blossom and birth whenever you feel like it. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Among wolves, when the bitch leavers her pups to go hunting, the young ones try to follow her out of the den and down the path. She snarls at them, lunges at them, and scares the bejeezus out of them till they run slipping and sliding back to the den. Their mother knows that they do not yet know how to weight and assess other creatures. They do not know who is a predator and who is not. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. In ancient times, purposeful solitude was both palliative and preventative. It was used to heal fatigue and to prevent weariness. It was also used as an oracle, as a way of listening to the inner self to solicit advice and guidance otherwise impossible to hear in the din of daily life. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

From her very flesh and blood and from the constant cycles of filling and emptying the red vase in her belly, a woman understands physically, emotionally, and spiritually that zeniths fade and expire, and what is left is reborn in unexpected ways and by inspired means, only to fall back to nothing, and yet be reconceived again in full glory. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

My dogs are a priority and a big responsibility ... but the payoffs are well worth it. — Will Estes

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

Do not cringe and make yourself small if you are called the black sheep, the maverick, the lone wolf. Those with slow seeing say that a noncomformist is a blight on society. But it has been proven over the centuries, that being different means standing at the edge, that one is practically guaranteed to make an original contribution, a useful and stunning contribution to her culture. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

It's drama, it's a lot of things, but you know it's always about every movie or every TV project ever made is meant to be watched. If people like it and support it, that's what it is all about, really it's sort of the important part about it. — Will Estes

Sometimes, girls, you have to hit your lowest low just before you hit your highest high. It makes you appreciate the good things so much more. — David Estes

I wish I knew at 14 not to put much thought into what other people my age said to me, cause we were all looking for the answers. So I wish I knew that other people really don't know any more than you do! — Will Estes

When I'm sixteen and reach the midpoint of my life, I'll have my first child. Not 'cause I want to, or 'cause I made a silly decision with a strapping young boy after sneaking a few sips of my father's fire juice, but 'cause I must. It's the Law of my people, the Heaters; a Law that's kept us alive and thriving for many years. A Law I fear. — David Estes

If you're going thru hell, keep going. — Rob Estes

How does one know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him. You tend to have nothing left to say about it all. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I'm into all that sappy stuff - a surprise picnic, nice dinner, or traveling. I'm kind of an old romantic. — Will Estes

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 Estes

Mystery can be overwhelming. Touching Divinity can seem like all one's atoms composing mind and body have suddenly been rearranged. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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 Estes

An actor can do a play on Broadway for three years. Every night he's expressing the same emotion in exactly the same way. He has developed a technique to convey those feelings so that he can get the ideas across. Or a musician may not want to play that damn music at all, but he has a booking and has to do it. — Richard Estes

To take the world into one's arms and act towards it in a soul-filled and soul-strengthening manner is a powerful act of wildish spirit. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Every creature on earth returns to home. It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places we live day after day. We understand that the loss of habitat is the most disastrous event that can occur to a free creauture.
We fervently point out how other creatures' natural territories have become surrounded by cities, ranches, highways, noise, and other dissonance, as though we are not affected also.
We know that for creatures to live on, they must at least from time to time have a home place, a place where they feel both protected and free — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one's own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one's own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Many of us have lived desert lives: very small on the surface, and enormous under the ground. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Any time I find medicine that's helpful, I share it with everyone I know. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Rudeness, abruptness, gory tales of blood and thunder, and coarse language usually show up the greenhorn or counterfeit, and certainly the ill-bred. "The bravest are the tenderest; the gentlest are the daring. — Kenneth W. Estes

The soul has no gender. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

She is often the broken-winged one, who does everything all wrong until people realize she's been doing it ... pretty right all along. She's the poor girl who never dressed right, who had torn hose, and they were all baggy around her ankles. She's the Raggedy Ann of the sophisticated world, who pulls it out at the last minute, flies by the seat of her pants, cackling all the way home. She is the late bloomer, the late start, the autumn bush, the winter holly. She is Baubo, all the classical Greek goddesses. She is the old girl who still blushes, and laughs, and dances. She's the truth teller, maybe that people hate to hear, but they learn to listen to. She is not dumb and in some ways is not shrewd. She works on passion, and the doll in her pocket, and the intuition that leads her into and through all the world. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

You can lead a horse to water, but they might prefer wiskey — Jeri Estes

To love pleasure takes little. To love truly takes a hero who can manage his own fear. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The deterioration of symbols is natural. They wear out, needing to be reclaimed, recreated; returned to the spirit. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

No beast of reality, or creature of imagination, is as terrible as mankind. Or as loving. It's a contradiction. I've always liked contradictions. Today I see both sides of the coin unveiled in gruesome and beautiful imagery, captured by my eyes and filed away in my mind, like still shots taken by a world-renowned photographer. — David Estes

After a long, long time she reached an important conclusion. She was never going to stand by and say nothing again. — Eleanor Estes

Whoever gossips to you will gossip of you"; "It is easier to be critical than correct"- avoid criticism about other officers, and never vent destructive criticism of your service, your unit, or your superiors. — Kenneth W. Estes

For a wild child born into a rigid community, the usual outcome is to experience the ignominy of being shunned. Shunning treats the victim as if she does not exist. It withdraws spiritual concern, love, and other psychic necessities from that person. The idea is to force her to conform, or else kill her spirituality and/or to drive her from the village to languish and die in the outback — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

My brain has no heart, and my heart has no brain. That's why when I speak my mind, I appear heartless and when I do what's in my heart I seem thoughtless. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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 Estes

Ignorance is the worst plague of all, a form of blindness that destroys the hearts of the people who hide behind it. — David Estes

The only trust required is to know that when there is one ending there will be another beginning. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I love the business. Hooking is
just acting laced with lust."
BUNNY Stilettos And Steel — Jeri Estes

If women were in charge of everything, there would be women tyrants. If black people were in charge, there would be black tyrants. If Hispanics were in charge, then Hispanic tyrants. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Family doesn't go one way. It goes every way. We help each other, we protect each other, and we die for each other, if that's what it takes. — David Estes

Is he seriously joking with me? The master of the dark art of raising the dead has become a standup comedian? Surely this is the end of the world. — David Estes

Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

What does this wildish intuition do for women? Like the wolf, intuition has claws that pry things open and pin things down, it has eyes that can through the shields of persona, it has ears that hear beyond the range of mundane human hearing. With these formidable psychic tools a woman takes on a shrewd and even precognitive animal consciousness, one that deepens her femininity and sharpens her ability to move confidently in the outer world. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

You know how most dogs lick you on the cheek? If you're sleeping and not ready for it, my dog, Joe, will get his tongue inside your mouth. It's by far the worst kiss I've ever had. — Will Estes

When we accept our own wild beauty, it is put into perspective, and we are no longer poignantly aware of it anymore, but neither would we forsake it or disclaim it either. Does a wolf know how beautiful she is when she sleeps? Does a feline know what beautiful shapes she makes when she sits? Is a bird awed by the sound it hears when it snaps open its wings? Learning from them, we just act in our own true way and do not draw back from or hide our natural beauty. Like the creatures, we just are, and it is right. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

If you'd have told me two weeks ago that one day I'd be part of a not-so-merry band of Necros seeking to exterminate a couple of other magic-born gangs, I'd have given you directions to the strait-jacket factory. — David Estes

Remember, if logic were all there really was to the world, then surely all men would ride sidesaddle — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

We can see that for the deep work to continue, trying to prove one's worth to the chorus of jealous hags is pointless. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

It's like she was metal and I was a magnet, Roc. But at the same time it felt like someone had shoved an electric wire into my skin and was frying me from the inside. It hurt like hell. No, worse than hell, Roc. And yet, somehow across the distance, through the fence, over the mob of people, I felt a pull to her, even though I knew it would hurt me to be closer to her. I probably would have just let it go, chalked it up to male hormones, but then when she acted so strong, pushed that guy ... I don't know, since then I can't get her out of my mind. — David Estes

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 many beginnings- all in the same relationship. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I call her Wild Woman, for those very words, wild and woman, create llamar o tocar a la puerta, the fairy-tale knock at the door of the deep feminine psyche. Llamar o tocar a la puerta means literally to play upon the instrument of the name in order to open a door. It means using words that summon up the opening of a passageway. No matter by which culture a woman is influenced, she understands the words wild and woman, intuitively. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Ben Estes knew he was going to die and it didn't make him feel any better to know that that was the chance he had lived with all these years. — Isaac Asimov

Among wolves, no matter how sick, no matter how cornered, no matter how alone, afraid or weakened, the wolf will continue.She will lope even with a broken leg. She will strenuously outwait, outwit, outrun and outlast whatever is bedeviling her. She will put her all into taking breath after breath. The hallmark of the wild nature is that it goes on. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Dogs are the magicians of the universe. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

If they ever create an award for best conversationalist, let me know and I'll apply. Until then, have a sip from my bottle of I-Don't-Give-A-Crap and keep on walking.
Laney — David Estes

To adjoin the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone, change everything from left to right, from black to white, to move the east to west, to act crazy or out of control. It does not mean to lose one's primary socializations, or to become less human. It means quite the opposite. The wild nature has a vast integrity to it — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Grandeur and sublimity, not softness, are the features of Estes Park. The glades which begin so softly are soon lost in the dark primaeval forests, with their peaks of rosy granite and their stretches of granite blocks piled and poised by nature in some mood of fury. — Isabella Bird