Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

Some stories are true that never happened.

Memory and the imagination are almost identical. It's the same place in the brain and the same thing is happening. When you think about your own life, there are no memories without place. You are always situated somewhere. I think the imagination - the narrative imagination at least - situates you in a specific space when you start to think of a story. I often use places I know. I put my characters inside rooms and houses that I'm familiar with - sometimes the houses of my parents or grandparents or previous apartments I've lived in.

I think a myth is created from truth.

I make a distinction between true and real. I think that the story is true, it’s just not real. That’s what a parable is. It takes things that we all know are real, and it takes life events that actually happens, and it weaves them into a fiction that allows truth to actually be embedded.

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

History has its truth; and so has legend hers.

I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.

I think it's good to leave people with the memory of that being a great character. And if we have a reason to bring him back, we'll bring him back.

Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.

One of the many lessons I hope I've learned is how much I underestimated people, their open-mindedness and their willingness to understand. I think, moreover, I underestimated the degree to which everyone has a story. So my advice, for whatever it's worth, is to trust readers, trust the truth and trust the power of storytelling.

All autobiography is fiction.

He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.

All stories are true.

Stories are important...They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.

The only one I have any trust in is storytelling - there's a couple I have a lot of trust in.

Writing isn't letters on paper. It's communication. It's memory.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

To see something marvelous with your own eyes-that's wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you'll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold only have an incomplete half of it, and that it won't ever really exist as a whole until you're together, talking or thinking about that moment ...that's worth more than one plus one. It's worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can't even imagine it.

Just so you know, when they say "Once upon a time” . . . they’re lying

Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.

Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.

It's all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.

For those of you who thought you'd be forgotten, The friends you've made will try their best, to make it so. Think of all the beauty that you left behind you. You can take it if you want it, and then let it go...

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.