66 Quotes by Mary Catherine Bateson

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

In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. 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.

Part of the task of composing a life is the artist’s need to find a way to take what is simply ugly and, instead of trying to deny it, to use it in the broader design.

Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.

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

If your opinions and commitments appear to change from year to year or decade to decade, what are the more abstract underlying convictions that have held steady, that might never have become visible without the surface variation?

It is not necessarily ominous that the formal family dinner is declining in many households or becoming limited to special occasions. We might be better off if we could separate food as nourishment and pleasure from food as the currency of care that leaves so many woman laboring long hours to prove affection in that semantic muddle called nurturance.

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.

For some of us, “chauvinism” is simply a shortening of “male chauvinism.” For others, it is a reminder of the dangers of devotion to the superiority of any group, gender, race, religion, or nation, or even to the truths of any era.