From Anthony Doerr’s About Grace.

“The human brain, he wrote, is seventy-five percent water. Our cells are little more than sacs in which to carry water. When we die it spills from us into the ground and air and into the stomachs of animals and is contained again in something else. The properties of liquid water are this: it holds its temperature longer than air; it is adhering and elastic; it is perpetually in moton. These are the tenets of hydrology; these are the things one should know if one is to know oneself.”

"Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared."

"These were facts, bounded by inviolable laws: water was elastic and adhesive, it held its temperature longer than air, it was perpetually in motion."

“To live in the tropics is to always be reminded (I find a hornet in my rice, a minnow in my shaving water) of the impossibility of ownership. The street in front of me belongs more to whatever is tunneling up those hundred or so little mounds of red dirt than to any of us. The beams of this apartment belong to houseflies; the window corners to spiders; the ceiling to house geckos and roaches. We are all just tenants here. Even the one thing we believe is ours – the time we’re given on earth – does that belong to us?.”

What is personal (private realm) stays personal in Anthony Doerr's first novel About Grace, the story of an hydrologist and his perilous dreams... Later on in the novel he stops dreaming, even if he does, it is not the kind of frightening dreams relating to deaths particularly of his dear ones.