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 BATESONOften continuity is visible only in retrospect.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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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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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.
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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 -
Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
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When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.
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Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.
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 -
The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.
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.
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A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.
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Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
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As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life.
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