Women Who Run With Wolves Quotes

“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, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“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, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“That is, to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“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, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“There is no one a wildish woman loves better than a mate who can be her equal.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Sometimes there are no words to help one's courage. Sometimes you just have to jump.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“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, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“The only trust required is to know that when there is one ending there will be another beginning.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“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, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“(Young girls) are taught to not see, and instead to "make pretty" all manner of grotesqueries whether they are lovely or not. This training is why the youngest sister can say, "Hmmm, his beard isn't really that blue." This early training to "be nice" causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching her young to "be nice" in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“To love a woman, the mate must also love her wildish nature.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“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, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Many of us have lived desert lives: very small on the surface, and enormous under the ground.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“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, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Wild Woman teaches women when not to act "nice" about protecting their soulful lives.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“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, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“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, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“We dismantle the predator by countering its diatribes with our own nurturant truths. Predator: You never finish anything you start. Yourself: I finish many things. We dismantle the assaults of the natural predator by taking to heart and working with what is truthful in what the predator says and then discarding the rest.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Like my kith and kin before me, I swagger-staggered in high heels, and I wore a dress and a hat to church. But my fabulous tail often fell below my hemline, and my ears twitched until my hat pitched, at the very least, down over both my eyes, and sometimes clear across the room.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Even in the best of worlds the soul needs refurbishing from time to time.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves