You can tell you’re alive when somebody touches you back. - Lois McMaster Bujold

“It’s important that someone celebrate our existence,” she objected amiably. “People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.”

Women. Uterine replicators with legs, as it were.

As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favor.