“No one can say what that means, [to take someone’s life]. The body is a colony of cells. Divided into two major parts, it perishes. But there is no reason to mourn the destruction of a colony of cells: such a colony dies each time a loaf of bread goes into the oven. If a man is no more than such a colony, a man is nothing; but we know instinctively that a man is more. What happens, then, to that part that is more?”

Gene Wolfe Shadow of the Torturer