Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
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Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
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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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Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
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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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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.
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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.
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Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
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...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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
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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.
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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.
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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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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
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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.
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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.
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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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Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
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We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they're defined.
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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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Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
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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.
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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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