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.
It's frightening to wake up one morning and discover that while you were asleep you went out of style.
Most people struggle with life balance simply because they haven't paid the price to decide what is really important to them.
There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as my last. There's only us, there's only this. Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way, no day but today.
we drove on and on, past little villages and both good things and bad things were happening to the people in those villages too, but I still was nothing but arms and ears and eyes and maybe there'd be either some good luck for me or more death tomorrow.
You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.
Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole.
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