Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes

If we examine ourselves carefully we shall see most of us have an enormous amount of unfinished business...We have to be free so that we can just step across the line and that's it. That is what real freedom is.

The moment we find the reason behind an emotion … the wall is breached, and the positive memories it has kept from us return too. That's why it pays to ask those painful questions. The answers can set you free.

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

Once I got into college, I discovered literature - in particular, multicultural literature. I just started to understand the power of story and narrative, and you know, like anyone else, I kind of wanted to do it, too.

My writing is a very authentic journey of discovery. I'm going out there to learn who I am. My readers, consequently, take the same journey as my protagonist.

A life being enacted onstage is a thing of utter fascination for me. And acting, it may begin out of vanity, but you hope that it's taken over by something else. I hope I've climbed over the vanity hurdle.

That's why writing is important to me. Time goes past, and you've been somewhere and come back that hasn't hurt you, and you've been somebody else.

I feel that the power that storytelling has to change people, to bring them together, to have that cathartic sort of experience, is something that definitely has helped my life be worthwhile and better.

Letting go is fearless. Then, moving on and being alright, that’s fearless too.

You break free when you feel neither beneath anyone nor superior to anyone, when you shed the need to control other people, when you create space for others to be who they are and for your real self to be what it is.

The real essence of art turned out to be not something high up and far off - it was right inside my ordinary daily self - If a musician wants to become a finer artist, he must first become a finer person.

You must reach inside yourselves where I live like a story, not old, not young laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt sand into something clear and bright.

There are so many difficult things and stories can make them palatable. That's the way I have always felt.

She had put despair and fear aside, as if they were garments she did not choose to wear.

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

Hate put me in prison. Love's gonna bust me out.

A heartfelt sense of aspiring cuts through negativity about yourself; it cuts through the heavy trips you lay on yourself.

I think that my sensibilities are becoming slightly less delicate and I'm venturing out in a storytelling world.

When sex disappears the tremendous energy of love is left behind. Each ugly thing in your mind, disappearing, leaves a great treasure behind.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They're taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don't want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That's what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you.

Once you decide not to worry about that stuff anymore, dating and relationships and love and all that, it's like you're free to get on with real life.

Nothing happened. And everything did. Your whole life you can be told something is wrong and so you believe it. Why should you question it? But then slowly seeds are planted inside of you, one by one, by a touch or a look or a day skateboarding in a park, and they start to burst out of old hulls shells and they start to sprout. And pretty soon there are so many of them. They are named Love and Trust and Kindness and Joy and Desire and Wonder and Spirit and Soulmate. They grow into a garden so dense and thick that it starts to invade your brain where the old things you were once told are dying.

It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.

Your past is just a story. And once you realize this it has no power over you.