Women Who Run With the Wolves
by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”
My Antonia
by Willa Cather
“I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating darkness.The feelings… were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself and having found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of destiny. It had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understand that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together in the precious incommunicable past.”
the unabridged journals of sylvia plath
by Sylvia Plath
"Stretch to others even though it hurts and strains and would be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance. Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body to take the hard way, the Spartan way, and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity."
the poetry of Mary oliver
"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”