Life & Wisdom Quote by Daniel Keys Moran

A line like this lands with the clean finality of a door locking: no bargaining, no committee meeting, no appeal to tradition. Moran frames bodily autonomy as a property right and a civil right at once, and the word “absolute” is doing the heavy lifting. It’s not just permissive (“you may”), it’s jurisdictional (“no one else has standing”). The phrasing also dodges sentimentality. There’s no appeal to virtue, purity, or even “deserving” choice. It’s an assertion of ownership over the one thing society reliably tries to manage for you.

The subtext is a preemptive strike against the usual paternalistic script: you’ll regret it, you’re being misled, you owe your body to family, nation, God, or “the greater good.” Moran’s sentence refuses that frame by collapsing the debate into a single axis: agency. “Your body and your life” links physical self-determination to narrative self-determination, implying that control over the body is control over the plot. Once someone else can edit your body, they can edit your future.

Context matters because Moran is a science-fiction writer, a genre built to stress-test political ideals by putting them under extreme conditions: advanced medicine, state surveillance, coercive institutions, bodily modification. In that terrain, autonomy isn’t abstract; it’s survival. The quote reads like a credo for characters (and readers) living under systems that treat bodies as resources. Its power comes from its simplicity: a moral claim stated like a boundary line, daring anyone to cross it and justify the trespass.