Women Who Run With Wolves Quotes

Sometimes a woman is afraid to be without security or without certainty, for even a short time. She has more excuses than dogs have hairs. She must just simply dive in and stand not knowing what will happen next.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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 naivete, inexperience, or foolishness.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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 Estés

Practice listening to your intuition, your inner voice; ask questions; be curious; see what you see; hear what you hear; and then act upon what you know to be true. These intuitive powers were given to your soul at birth.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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 Estés

To love a woman, the mate must also love her wildish nature.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Women's curiosity was given a negative connotation, whereas men were called investigative. Women were called nosy, whereas men were called inquiring. In reality, the trivialization of women's curiosity so that it seems like nothing more than irksome snooping denies women's insight, hunches, and intuitions. It denies all her senses. It attempts to attack her fundamental power.

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

Even in the best of worlds the soul needs refurbishing from time to time.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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 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 criatura, 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