The Covenant of Water

Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.

We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill.

I have been bent and broken but I hope into better shape.

The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

To be listened to is healing,

Secrecy lives in the same rooms as loneliness.

Roses would be annoying weeds if the blooms never withered and died. Beauty resides in the knowledge that it doesn’t last.

A dog lives for you. A cat just lives with you.

But such memories are woven from gossamer threads; time eats holes in the fabric, and these she must darn with myth and fable.

Success is not money! Success is you are fully loving what you are doing. That only is success!

The voyage of discovery is not about new lands, but having new eyes.

You can’t walk across a lake just because you change its name to “land.” Labels matter.

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I’ve lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, Queequeg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.

Philipose quotes Gandhi: “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of food.

sometimes we have to “live the question,” not push for the answer.

All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous. And his land is a place where he can no longer stay.

Sooner or later, she must sit down to the meal of consequences

The minutes we spend watching the waves don’t count against our life spans,

the sweetness of life is sure in only two things: love and sugar. If you don’t get enough of the first, have more of the second!

there’s no going back; time and water move on relentlessly.

Child, the past is past, and furthermore it’s different every time I remember it.

Such precious, precious water, Lord, water from our own well; this water that is our covenant with You, with this soil, with the life You granted us. We are born and baptized in this water, we grow full of pride, we sin, we are broken, we suffer, but with water we are cleansed of our transgressions, we are forgiven, and we are born again, day after day till the end of our days. Her mat takes her weight kindly, eases

Mariamma, sometimes when you are most afraid, when you feel most helpless, that is when God is pointing out a path for you.

when it’s all done, when life is almost over, what do you want to remember?

Even before his brain digests these sights, his body—skin, nerve endings, lungs, heart—recognizes the geography of his birth. He never understood how much it mattered. Every bit of this lush landscape is his; its every atom contains him.

The chaos and hurt in God’s world are unfathomable mysteries, yet the Bible shows her that there is order beneath. As her father would say, “Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.

For twenty-eight years of Baby Mol’s life, the sun has never failed to come up, yet every morning she’s ecstatic at its return. To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.

A woman with unconventional beauty raises the hope that the viewer might be the only one to see it, that in recognizing and appreciating it, he alone has created her beauty.