Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep.

If a man's at odds to know his own mind it's because he hasn't got aught but his mind to know it with.

Ironically, it was because I was raised as a Muslim in the South, that I realised the value in being true to who you really are. I've just got so many things going on inside. I don't know how to resolve all of them other than being true to who I am.

Over and over again, I'm trying to express or communicate these big and small struggles to the world, and really to myself.

I write because I don't know how to ask my questions any other way.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I don't know if I'm striving for anything that I can put into words.

I would stay in my room for days, for days at times, just trying to get it together, to know what my next phase was going to be.

I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

I don't like talking about myself. I don't like talking about these introspective things.

Fighting for identity is something that is very much in my life.

We all want to be someone else but without ceasing to be ourselves. I think it's very important to defend this idea in real life too.

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

I used to love writing in my journal.

Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

I think the whole idea of me was that I wasn't going to be but that I wanted to be, desperately.

My life was a mystery even as I lived it.

I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.

When I started studying acting in New York, I didn't plan to be an action hero. I just wanted to learn acting because I felt it was something I needed to try to do for myself, to express something, my inner pain, or something I couldn't get out.

I am always writing to myself.