Each woman has potential access to Rio Banjo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayer making, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between-worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of the arts.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Every creature on earth returns to home. It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places we live day after day. We understand that the loss of habitat is the most disastrous event that can occur to a free creature. We fervently point out how other creatures' natural territories have become surrounded by cities, ranches, highways, noise, and other dissonance, as though we are not affected also. Furthermore, we know that for creatures to live on, they must at least from time to time have a home place, a place where they feel both protected and free

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Failure is a greater teacher than success

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured, touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad, and other derogation, she emanates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for Wild Woman, Even the more repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feelings which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the Willis self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

From her very flesh and blood and from the constant cycles of filling and emptying the red vase in her belly, a woman understands physically, emotionally, and spiritually that zeniths fade and expire, and what is left is reborn in unexpected ways and by inspired means, only to fall back to nothing, and yet be preconceived again in full glory.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

How does one know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him. You tend to have nothing left to say about it all.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

I am amazed how little women cry nowadays, and then apologetically. I worry when shame or disuse begins to steal away such a natural function. To be a flowering tree and to be moist is essential, otherwise you will break. Crying is good, it is right. It does not cure dilemma, but it enables the process to continue instead of collapsing.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés