Kiran

“I gasped. "Wait a minute! Am I a guinea pig? I'm a guinea pig!"
"No, it's not like that," she said.
I stared at her.
She stared at me.
I stared at her.
"Okay, it's exactly like that," she said.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

“You have always been the worst of my children,” he said. “Be sure to not dishonor me.”

“I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“A golden cage is still a cage.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe