The Covenant of Water

by Abraham Verghese

If one imagines what God is saying, is that the same as God actually speaking?

Her life before Parambil, that fleeting childhood, is like a dream that crumbles in daylight; she holds onto its edges while the middle vanishes.

what is unknown is often just undiscovered.

We are dying while we’re living, we are old even when we’re young, we are clinging to life even as we resign ourselves to leaving it.

A narrow shaft of sunlight filters through leaves, touches the bed. The God who never interferes with drownings or train wrecks likes to peer in on the human experiment at such moments of reckoning,