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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONOf any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can’t think without metaphors.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
As we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. … We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON