Iron John

A girl changes into a woman on her own, with the bodily developments marking the change; old women tell her stories and chants, and do celebrations.

Each father inherits thousands of years of cunning and elaborate fatherhood. An apparently weak father can control the entire family from beneath with his silences.

human self-esteem is a delicate matter, and not to be dismissed as infantile grandiosity.

choose what you want and then pay for it.

Having no soul union with other men can be the most damaging wound of all.

A child has a mood—he or she wants to play, or stay in the room, or be loony. The grownups have bigger moods. The abusive, or depressed, or alcoholic, or workaholic, or crazy parent has an enormous mood, and it is the only mood that counts. The children and the other parent have to adapt to that big mood, serve it, cater to it, sacrifice their mood

If we choose “the one precious thing”—the object of our desire—then, according to the alchemists, the inner King in us that has been asleep for so many years wakes up.

Shame keeps us from cultivating a garden.

The burning of the Wild Man preceded the burning of the witches by several centuries, and it proceeded from the same fear and anger.