Nikki

“through it all, her mother’s mind must have been intact, the artist forced to witness the creeping ruin of her once-beautiful body, the progressive diminution of her capacity to make art. Mariamma cannot even begin to fathom such suffering.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“After tea [Nanny Ripeka] began to tell me the old photographs, which I already knew, fading on every wall. Tell me who they were and what they were to me. Then she told me of the ones before that, who were not on the walls but whom she had known. Then back before that to the ones she had never known or seen. And her voice that had been slow at the beginning and thoughtful began to chant out the ancient names coming from far back, so I could know them. I was beginning to know them because I had heard them many times before. Beginning to know, yet knowing there was more to understand.”
― Patricia Grace, Mutuwhenua : the moon sleeps

“He never understood how much it mattered. Every bit of this lush landscape is his; its every atom contains him. On this blessed strip of coast where Malayalam is spoken, the flesh and bones of his ancestors have leached into the soil, made their way into the trees, into the iridescent plumage of the parrots on swaying branches, and dispersed themselves into the breeze. He knows the names of the forty-two rivers running down from the mountains, one thousand two hundred miles of waterways, feeding the rich soil in between, and he is one with every atom of it.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“She could handle Glaswegians, men who roiled and churned, it was the quiet, loch-deep rage of the islanders she found terrifying.”
― Douglas Stuart, John of John