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Quote by Marion Woodman

“We are all unconsciously bound to the wheel of fortune. It goes round and round and we go blindly around on it until one day something happens that wakes us up, face to face with ourselves. What for years we could not or would not see is made visible. The unconscious is made answerable to consciousness. The Self demands a reckoning: the ego must recognize what it has long feared and rejected. Whether we grow or wither in that encounter depends on whether we cling to our ego's rigid standpoint or whether we choose to trust the Self and leap into the unknown.”

Quote by Marion Woodman

Book:The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women
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The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

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Author

Marion Woodman
Marion Woodman

Marion Woodman is an American author known for her profound insights into women's psychology and mythology. Her works explore women's identity, dreams, and the creative process. more

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“We are born in a state of inflation. In earliest infancy, no ego or consciousness exists. All is in the unconscious. The latent ego is in complete identification with the Self. The Self is born, but the ego is made; and in the beginning all is Self. This state is described by Neumann as the uroborus (the tail-eating serpent). Since the Self is the center and totality of being, the ego totally identified with the Self experiences itself as a deity. We can put it in these terms retrospectively although, of course, the infant does not think in this way. He cannot yet think at all, but his total being and experience are ordered around the a priori assumption of deity. This is the original state of unconscious wholeness and perfection which is responsible for the nostalgia we all have toward our origins, both personal and historical.”

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Book:Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche
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“But you know, mon petite, what you got is a gift. And when de good Lord gives you a gift you have to use it. Dat's why he put you here on dis earth. Sometime it's gonna be to help a soul cross over to de other side to meet him. If dat's whey you gott do, den dat's what you gotta do. You can't just keep collecting de dead. You gonna have to find a way to take what you got and work wit dat.”

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Book:Toe to Toe
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“At this, another consideration: who was God? She had heard a terrible lot about Him, always: but the question of His identity had been left vague, as much taken for granted as her own. Wasn't she perhaps God, herself? Was it that she was trying to remember? However, the more she tried, the more it eluded her. (How absurd, to disremember such an important point as whether one was God or not!) So she let it slide: perhaps it would come back to her later.”

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Book:A High Wind in Jamaica
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“And who was I? Not nearly as much of a loner and outsider as I’d always thought. A bit odd, but others were more odd. And who else was I? A member of an expedition, or no, someone who’d been on an expedition all by himself, and after forging his way through all sorts of difficulties had come back here to civilization to freshen up, for the time being, before his next one-man venture. And who else? At first sight a disturbed person, who, when you got to know him, seemed much more normal, indeed the only normal person among a thousand, while the other nine hundred and ninety-nine eventually turned out to be as mad as hatters. And who else was I? (As if, having seen my double, I suddenly couldn’t find out enough about myself - couldn’t get enough of myself.) Let me be someone else as well, play someone else: a pioneer, a deserter, a soccer referee or at least a linesman. And what was I like, considering my double there in the restroom’s white neon glare? Not special. Not that bad. Maybe somewhat deficient in that certain something, but not entirely deficient either. Far from being a star, but if an idiot, a village idiot, not a provincial or city idiot. And what else was I like? And in what way? And in what other way? Well, what d’you know! Yes, just look at that! You didn’t expect that, did you? Look, just look! Yes, just look. Look!”

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Book:Quiet Places: Collected Essays
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