Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONLearning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
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Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
A disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
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Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.
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The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.
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In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
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The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
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Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.
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The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
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The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
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There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can’t think without metaphors.
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Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.
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Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.
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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON