They are not the same thing, and a wiser man would have known it.

A person’s power does not live in their posture, or their circumstances, or whether they happen at a given moment to be standing in a boardroom or lying in a hospital bed.

Mine lived in a document I had drafted four years earlier and in a structure only I could unlock, and it was exactly as intact at ten centimeters dilated as it had ever been at the head of a conference table.

He struck at me when I looked helpless, never grasping that what made me dangerous had nothing to do with how I looked, and everything to do with what I had built while he wasn’t paying attention.