Quotes from Marion Woodman

When Matisse was asked whether he believed in God, his response was, 'yes, when I'm working'.

She dreams she is in a glass coffin. From her prison, details have beauty. In her aloneness, she imagines emotions. Her husband is the perfect bridegroom, the trickster, the small boy looking for mother. She is goddess and mirror, siren and friend, femme fatale and sacrificing wife. He is attracted to her girlhood purity, her desire to sacrifice, to serve. At first he may be flattered: she sees him as a god.

This is the beginning of a road whose end is totally unknown and totally known.

You think of yourself -- light, fast, free -- free of earth, free of bondage to your body. In your 'perfect' body, you are in control, addicted to the light that keeps you out of body. You're a swan maiden, addicted to wings, addicted to spirit. You refused to eat in order to fly.

Old Mother God, Old Father God— they keep us trapped. And we do give up. We pull the covers over our head, and go back to sleep. Only to dream of old dragons, old alligators, old crocodiles drinking our blood. To dream of cold-eyed lawmakers saying, This is the way it's always been done. It works. It will stay this way. And you will obey.

The solid line throughout was my trying to make space to fly and forever smashing my wings against the bars of the cage. Granted, the cage grew bigger and very big, but I was always beyond the collective in my soul and always cut back by the collective in my body.

The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power. Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.

Recognizing the difference between power and love is difficult if we were raised in a home where power was disguised as love.

Can I really believe I am worth an hour a day? Am I, who have given my life to others, selfish enough to take one hour a day to find myself?

Since she has not been present in the culture, she has not been readily accessible to the conscious awareness of modern women. Without her, even the dynamic symbols of Virgin and Mother are distorted. The Crone is a woman is that part of her psyche that is not identified with any relationship nor confined by any bond. She infuses an intrinsic sense of self-worth, of autonomy, into the role of virgin and mother, and gives the woman strength to stand to her own creative experience.

It is our very fear of the future that distorts the now that could lead to a different future if we dared to be whole in the present.

The longing for sweets is really a yearning for love or 'sweetness.'