50 Inspiring Quotes from Women Who Run With the Wolves
In the absence of a culture that is steeped in ritual, rite, and ceremony, there are certain tools we must turn to for support during the major initiations in life.
Myths, fairy tales, and stories are some of these tools.
One of the most important books ever written on the topic of women’s mythology and the Wild Woman archetype is Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
Many of you will have heard of it, some of you might have read it, but I will dare to say we all can benefit from it.
Women Who Run With the Wolves is one of those books that makes something in you come alive. It awakens a part of the soul that has been dormant, that has been taught to forget who she is.
In short, it helps us remember…that is re-member, put ourselves back together, return to wholeness.
Whether you’re new to this gem of a book or you’ve read it many times, I hope you’ll enjoy this compilation of 50 of my favorite quotes. xx
“Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion”
“Like a trail through a forest which becomes more and more faint and finally seems to diminish to a nothing, traditional psychological theory too soon runs out for the creative, the gifted, the deep woman.”
“Traditional psychology is often spare or entirely silent about deeper issues important to women: the archetypal, the intuitive, the sexual and cyclical, the ages of women, a woman’s way, a woman’s knowing, her creative fire.”
“A woman’s issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture, nor can she be bent into a more intellectually acceptable shape by those who claim to be the sole bearers of consciousness.”
“Fairy tales, myths, and stories provide understandings which sharpen our sight so that we can pick out and pick up the path left by the wildish nature. The instruction found in story reassures us that the path has not run out, but still leads women deeper, and more deeply still, into their own knowing.”
“When women hear those words [wild and woman], an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life.”
“[Wild Women] know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away, they know how to stay.”
“Wild Woman is the health of all women. Without her, women’s psychology makes no sense.”
“The comprehension of this Wild Woman nature is not a religion, but a practice. It is a psychology in its truest sense: psukhe/psych, soul; ology or logos, a knowing of the soul.”
“In the case of the Wild Woman archetype…we must be more interested in the thoughts, feelings, and endeavors which strengthen women, and adequately count the interior and the cultural factors which weaken women.”
“A psychology which fails to address this innate spiritual being at the center of feminine psychology fails women, and fails their daughters and their daughters’ daughters far into all future matrilineal lines.”
“The wild nature carries the bundles for healing; she carries everything a woman needs to be and know.”
“I use the simplest and most accessible ingredient for healing—stories.”
“Art is important for it commemorates the seasons of the soul, or a special or tragic event in the soul’s journey.”
“Stories are medicine…The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories.”
“Stories are embedded with instructions which guide us about the complexities of life.”
“The old one, The One Who Knows, is within us. She thrives in the deepest soul-psyche of women, the ancient and vital wild Self.”
“This is our meditation practice as women, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of ourselves, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of life itself.”
“The great work before us is to learn to understand what around and about us and what within us must live, and what must die.”
“Babies are born wizened with instinct. They know in their bones what is right and what to do about it. It is innate. If a woman holds on to this gift of being old while she is young and young while she is old, she will always know what comes next. If she has lost it, she can yet reclaim it with some purposeful psychic work.”
“To forbid a woman to use the key to conscious self-knowledge strips away her intuitive nature, her natural instinct for curiosity that leads her to discover ‘what lies underneath’ and beyond the obvious. Without this knowing, the woman is without proper protection.”
“When women open the doors of their own lives and survey the carnage there in those out-of-the-way places, they most often find they have been allowing summary assassinations of their most crucial dreams, goals, and hopes. They find lifeless thoughts and feelings and desires; ones which were once graceful and promising but now are drained of blood.”
“The deepest work is usually the darkest.”
“A brave woman, a wisening woman, will develop the poorest psychic land, for if she builds only on the best land of her psyche, she will have for a view the least of what she is. So do not be afraid to investigate the worst. It only guarantees increase of soul power through fresh insights and opportunities for re-visioning one’s life and self anew.”
“It is in this psychic kind of land development that Wild Woman shines. She is not afraid of the darkest dark, in fact, she can see in the dark.”
26. “The cellar, dungeon, and cave symbols are all related to one another. They are ancient initiatory environs; places to or through which a woman descends to the murdered one(s), breaks taboos to find the truth, and through wit and/or travail triumphs by banishing, transforming, or exterminating the assassin of the psyche.”
27. “The cure for both the naive woman and the instinct-injured woman is the same: 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.”
28. “By retrieving these powers from the shadows of our psyches, we shall not be simple victims of internal or external circumstances.”
29. “When the soulful life is being threatened, it is not only acceptable to draw the line and mean it, it is required.”
30. “Being bound to one’s intuition promotes a confident reliance on it, no matter what. It changes a woman’s guiding attitude from ‘what will be will be’ to ‘let me see all there is to see.’”
31. “If the deep intuition says,’ Do this, do that, go this way, stop here, go forward.’ the woman must make corrections to her plan as needed. Intuition is not to be consulted once and then forgotten. It is not disposable.”
32. “A lover can engender and/or destroy even our most durable connections to our own cycles and ideas. The destructive lover must be avoided. A better sort of lover is one finely wrought of strong psychic muscle and tender flesh. For Wild Woman it also helps if the lover is just a little bit ‘psychic’ too, a person who can ‘see into’ her heart.”
33. “Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows.”
34. “When we are connected to the instinctual self, to the soul of the feminine which is natural and wild, then instead of looking over whatever happens to be on display, we say to ourselves, ‘What am I hungry for?’”
35. “A lover has to be chosen from soul-craving.”
36. “Nature does not ask permission. Blossom and birth whenever you feel like it. As adults we need little permission but rather more engendering, much more encouraging of the wild cycles, much more original vision.”
37. “Poets understand there is nothing of value without death.”
38. “The very young, the uninitiated, the hungry, and the wounded have values that revolve around the finding and the winning of trophies.”
39. “A part of every woman and every man resists knowing that in all love relationships Death must have her share. We pretend we can love without our illusions about love dying, pretend we can go on without our superficial expectations dying, pretend we can progress and that our favorite flushes and rushes will never die. But in love, psychically, everything becomes picked apart, everything.”
40. “The desire to force love to live on its most positive form only is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead, and for good.”
41. “The unwild want consistency.”
42. “It is not good to base the soul identity solely on the feats and losses and victories of the bad times…When a woman insists ‘I am a survivor’ over and over again once the time for its usefulness is past, the work ahead is clear. We must loosen the person’s clutch on the survivor archetype. Otherwise nothing else can grow.
43. “Ritual is one of the ways in which humans put their lives in perspective.”
44. “When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms, and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behavior, they are captured in both body and soul, and are no longer free.”
45. “Thriving is what was meant for us on this earth. Thriving, not just surviving, is our birthright as women.”
46. “Many people treat their bodies as if the body is a slave, or perhaps they even treat it well but demand it follow their wishes and whims as though it were a slave nonetheless.”
47. “Hold out. Hold on. Do your work. You will find your own way.”
48. “If we could realize that the work is to keep doing the work, we would e much more fierce and much more peaceful.”
49. “To hold joy, we may sometimes have to fight for it, we may have to strengthen ourselves and go full-bore, doing battle in whichever ways we deem most shrewd.”
50. “The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life; hold on, for the promise from the wild nature is this: after winter, spring always comes.”