With a Daughter's Eye Quotes

“We talk in this country often about property rights, but we talk more rarely about the shares people have in each other's lives, and about people's rights to participation and pleasure, especially at the moments of passage: the right to throw a handful of earth on a coffin, the right to stand up to catch a tossed bouquet and dream of one's own future wedding, to kiss a bride or groom and to hold a newborn. Couple's today devise new rituals or set up housekeeping together in ways most meaningful to themselves without wondering whether meaning is something they owe to a larger community.”
― Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson

“Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until noveltyt and entertainmet are built up as positive experiences.”
― Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson

“I have always tended to look to the special circumstances of my childhood whenever I felt unhappy or lacking in confidence, and yet it is not reasonable to attribute a degree of estrangement that is part of the general human condition to a particular idiosyncratic experience.”
― Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson