Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.
Interpretation
Life is a continuous journey full of ups and downs, where failure can be a powerful learning experience.
In this quote, Clarissa Pinkola Estes emphasizes that life is not a short story with a finite conclusion; rather, it is a series of chapters where each experience, whether success or failure, contributes to our personal growth. She encourages us to view failures not as definitive ends, but as opportunities to learn and improve, reminding us that there will always be new chances to shape our lives as we desire.
In practice
In a motivational speech about resilience and personal growth.
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
That is what the intuition is for: it is the direct messenger of the soul.
The clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one.
My entire concept of lifestyle is built on the foundation of my homes. There is no more important expression of this concept than that of my own personal living space.
Life is an incurable disease leading to death, but it's also an unrequested gift, which, if we can manage to keep giving it away to others, can keep giving back everything to us.
When I was a child, my father used to take me for walks, often along a river or by the sea. We would pass people fishing, perhaps reeling in their lines with struggling fish hooked at the end of them. Once I saw a man take a small fish out of a bucket and impale it, still wriggling, on an empty hook to use as bait.
A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.
Fantastic days are what you wish upon those who have so few sunrises left, those whose lungs are so lesion-spangled with new cancer that they should be embracing as much life as they can. Time's a-wasting, go out and have yourself a fantastic day! Fantastic days are for goners.
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