The Witch's Dream Quotes

“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

“He told me that nagualism begins with two certainties: the certainty that human beings are extraordinary beings living in an extraordinary world; and the certainty that neither men nor the world should ever be taken for granted under any circumstances.”
― Florinda Donner, The Witch's Dream: A Healer's Way of Knowledge

“Florinda was convinced that a person who successfully restored health, whether a doctor or a folk healer, was someone who could alter the body’s fundamental feelings about itself and its link with the world—that is, someone who offered the body, as well as the mind, new possibilities so that the habitual mold to which body and mind had learned to conform could be systematically broken down. Other dimensions of awareness would then become accessible, and the commonsense expectations of disease and health could become transformed as new bodily meanings became crystalized.”
― Florinda Donner, The Witch's Dream: A Healer's Way of Knowledge