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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.

Mary Catherine Bateson

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Mary Catherine Bateson
Age: 81 †
Born: 1939
Born: December 8
Died: 2021
Died: January 2
Anthropologist
Writer
New York City
New York
Mary C. Bateson
Partings
Time
Parting
Realization
Return
Parents
Parent
Dies
Past

More quotes by Mary Catherine Bateson

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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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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
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Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
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Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.
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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.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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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.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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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.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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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.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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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.
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Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
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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.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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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
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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.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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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
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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
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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they're defined.
Mary Catherine Bateson