Azita Rassi

“Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself—will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows—some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history—But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, “This fact I can do without.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“How quickly children grow! They are infants -- you look away a minute and in that time they have left their babyhood behind.”
― Kamala Markandaya, Nectar in a Sieve

“As one who has experienced extensively with life in the home and community, using real people in true-to-life situations, I doubt that any playthings could prepare a child for one millionth of what is going to hit him in the teeth, ready or not. My own feeling is that a child should start experimenting with real people and real communities from the moment of birth, if possible. If, for some reason, these materials are not available, then playthings must be used. But not bland, pleasing, smooth, easily manipulated playthings like those in your brochure, friends! Let there be nothing harmonious about our children’s playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive. As for children’s working off aggressions, I’m against it. They are going to need all the aggressions they can contain for ultimate release in the adult world.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“This news, that I had broadcast the coded announcement of my Helga’s disappearance, broadcast it without even knowing what I was doing, somehow upset me more than anything in the whole adventure. It upsets me even now. Why, I don’t know. It represented, I suppose a wider separation of my several selves than even I can bear to think about. At that climactic moment in my life, when I had to suppose that my Helga was dead, I would have liked to mourn as an agonized soul, indivisible. But no. One part of me told the world of the tragedy in code. The rest of me did not even know that the announcement was being made.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night