Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.

My home is not a place, it is people.

All true wealth is biological.

I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.

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

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one. The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.

The Imperial Service could win a war without coffee, but would prefer not to have to.