Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes - Page 2

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• Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Creativity, Way, Lasts

  Mary Catherine Bateson (2001). “Composing a Life”, p.4, Grove Press

  7 Copy quote

• Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Lying, Games, Play

  4 Copy quote

• Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Loss, Echoes, Identity

  Mary Catherine Bateson (2007). “Composing a Life”, p.180, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspirational, Memorable, Stopping

  Mary Catherine Bateson (2001). “Composing a Life”, p.14, Grove Press

  12 Copy quote

• Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked into the design of every life, meeting an individual need as well as a pervasive need in society.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Memorable, Caring, Design

  Mary Catherine Bateson (1990). “Composing a Life”, Plume

  10 Copy quote

• The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Cute, Understanding, Looks

  9 Copy quote

• Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Food, Cooking, Culinary

  Mary Catherine Bateson (1985). “With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson”, Pocket Books

  9 Copy quote

• The caretaking has to be done. "Somebody's got to be the mommy." Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Needs, Done, Steps

  Mary Catherine Bateson (1990). “Composing a Life”, Plume

  8 Copy quote

• We do not need to understand other people and their customs fully to interact with them and learn in the process; it is making the effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, which allows us to grow.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Knowing, People, Effort

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Answers, Patterns, Coherence

  8 Copy quote

• Traditionally in American society, men have been trained for both competition and teamwork through sports, while women have been reared to merge their welfare with that of the family, with fewer opportunities for either independence or other team identifications, and fewer challenges to direct competition. In effect, women have been circumscribed within that unit where the benefit of one is most easily believed to be the benefit of all.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Teamwork, Sports, Women

  4 Copy quote

• The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Commitment, Democracy, Essentials

  Mary Catherine Bateson (2007). “Composing a Life”, p.155, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  8 Copy quote

• When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Peace, Children, Differences

  9 Copy quote

• A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Numbers, Training, Physicians

  Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson (1987). “Angels fear: towards an epistemology of the sacred”, MacMillan Publishing Company

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Christian, Imagination, Religion

  Mary Catherine Bateson (1985). “With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson”, Pocket Books

  7 Copy quote

• Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizing, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Biblical, Opposites, Ideas

  4 Copy quote

• Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Change, Entertainment, Positive Experiences

  Mary Catherine Bateson (1985). “With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson”, Pocket Books

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Music, Time Flies, Support

  Mary Catherine Bateson (2007). “Composing a Life”, p.14, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  7 Copy quote

• In many ways, constancy is an illusion.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Memorable, Way, Illusion

  Mary Catherine Bateson (2001). “Composing a Life”, p.14, Grove Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Nature, Children, Bending Down

  Mary Catherine Bateson (1985). “With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson”, Pocket Books

  14 Copy quote

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