Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

In many ways, constancy is an illusion... 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
Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.

Mary Catherine Bateson
The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.

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.

Mary Catherine Bateson
If you compare statistics on different types of households, you find that the presence of an adult male means more additional work for the woman than the presence of a child under ten, even when the man believes himself to be sharing the housework equally.

Mary Catherine Bateson
After all, most of us have lived lives based on commitments made without any way of knowing where they would lead. The uncertainty is an essential element in commitment, the acceptance of consequences an essential element in fidelity.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.

Mary Catherine Bateson
As people grow older, some of the ways they have contributed in the past may no longer be possible, but the challenge to society is not only to provide help and care where these are needed but also to offer the opportunity to contribute and care for others.

Mary Catherine Bateson
It's all about being in control of myself as an older woman who lives alone, and it's all about how I am going to do what I have to do to be as strong as I can be and be confident that I can do what I need to do as an older person.

Mary Catherine Bateson
There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

Mary Catherine Bateson
The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.

Mary Catherine Bateson
I had repeatedly accepted inappropriate burdens, stepping in to do what needed to be done. In retrospect, I think I carried them well, but the cost was that I was chronically overloaded, weary, and short of time for politicking, smoothing ruffled feathers, and simply resting.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Solutions to problems often depend upon how they're defined.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

Mary Catherine Bateson
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
Improvisation and new learning are not private processes; they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.

Mary Catherine Bateson
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
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
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
Moving is both liberating and debilitating. Undertaken too late, it is a very stressful process, one that sometimes seems to catapult people into frail old age, and undertaken too soon, it may preempt other possibilities.

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
Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas, enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations.

Mary Catherine Bateson
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
Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.

Mary Catherine Bateson
When parents die, all of the partings of the past are revoked with the realization that this time they will not return.

Mary Catherine Bateson
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
Since few people arrive at retirement with an understanding that this transition will involve a rethinking of who they are, an interim pattern has emerged, in which travel offers a way of fulfilling deferred daydreams of adventure while the next stage takes shape.

Mary Catherine Bateson