The Covenant of Water

by Abraham Verghese

If I was ready to die for something that I don’t believe in, surely, I must be willing to live for the one thing I do believe in.”

‘At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind.’”

Without the ‘gift of pain,’ as he says, we have no protection.”

The nature of the happiness that came from love was that it was fleeting, evanescent. Nothing lasted but the land—the soil—and it would outlast them all.

I have no choice, which is the best kind of choice.

standing in the water that connects them all in time and space and always has.

This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.

There’s a chasm in my life of all these intervening years, our separate lives.