S. Venugopal > Quotes

“The forest was demonically divine at that hour, a bone-white painting on midnight blue paper. I knew I was just the shadowed body an artist leaves on the margins, meant to stand there until the end of time for something outside this universe to watch, so it could shudder at my isolation, my insignificance, and admire the chilling vastness of the world I wanted to leave.”
― S. Venugopal, Body Traitor's History

“He no longer squints in abject confusion at the name of an exercise on his training sheet and does not look at the weighted bar I give him as though waiting for it to issue his marching orders. His body flows from one stance to the next instead of battering the mat or squeaking across the floor. He does not conclude an abdominal exercise and then remark that his neck feels overused.”
― S. Venugopal, Body Traitor's History

“The royal poison taster tumbled to the floor, retching. Soldiers burst into the kitchen with their swords drawn and shouted at us to stop cooking until the cause was discovered.

The assassins? Three courtiers’ wives who had baked a giant pineapple cake with mustard oil instead of melted butter.”
― S. Venugopal, Body Traitor's History

“I had expected an otherworldly goddess of ice but am instead bowing to a far more dangerous deity: a wife and mother who is disappointed in her husband and her son.”
― S. Venugopal, Body Traitor's History

“I am for the first time bewitched by the sun that I thought had given away the glorious opulence with which it warmed the days of the golden past.”
― S. Venugopal, Body Traitor's History

“You give yourself to me in cut yet bloodless scraps when I can hold all of you even now,” the lover says. “I shall hold you effortlessly, my prince. Let me prove it to you.”
― S. Venugopal

“For the first time since he gave me words, I hear my master fighting to find them and I know it is only because he is searching the universe within him for an answer that will make his love an unhealing scar on time itself, so that it will gush blood endlessly on sight and leave no chance of doubt or misinterpretation even after we give up our bodies and the world fills with those who will only ever see us as unfeeling beasts.”
― S. Venugopal, Body Traitor's History

“I had thought your return would be akin to gaining a strong arm, but I see now I have been blessed with an overgrown fingernail.”
― S. Venugopal, Body Traitor's History

“The stupidest time to try and change a man’s eating habits is when he is eating.

The second most deadly occasion is when he discovers that a beloved article of clothing has unexplainably become too tight around the stomach.”
― S. Venugopal, Body Traitor's History