Florinda Donner

“In the warrior’s path, women don’t feel important,” she went on, in the tone of someone reciting from memory, “because importance waters down fierceness. In the warrior’s path women are fierce. They remain fiercely impassive under any conditions. They don’t demand anything, yet they are willing to give anything of themselves. They fiercely seek a signal from the spirit of things in the form of a kind word, an appropriate gesture; and when they get it, they express their thanks by redoubling their fierceness. “In the warrior’s path, women don’t judge. They fiercely reduce themselves to nothing in order to listen, to watch, so that they can conquer and be humbled by their conquest or be defeated and be enhanced by their defeat. “In the warrior’s path, women don’t surrender. They may be defeated a thousand times, but they never surrender. And above all, in the warrior’s path, women are free.”
― Florinda Donner, The Witch's Dream: A Healer's Way of Knowledge

“Florinda said that I had discovered the value of the warrior’s way and the meaning of all its premises. Under the impact of an unfamiliar life situation, I had found out that not to surrender means freedom, that not to feel self-important breeds an indomitable fierceness, and that to vanquish moral judgments brings an all-soothing humbleness that is not servitude.”
― Florinda Donner, The Witch's Dream: A Healer's Way of Knowledge