Lethal Competence Quotes

“I want her sharp. I want her cunning. I want to look at her across a room full of plastic smiles and hollow conversations and think: She is out of my league in ways I don't even understand yet.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I want to engage in a conversation that feels like a knife fight in a phone booth, and if she can’t mentally back me into a corner and hold a blade to my throat, what are we even doing?”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I want to look into her eyes and feel utterly, comprehensively outmatched.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“Every time you say 'yes' when you mean 'no,' you put a bullet in the head of the real you.

You’re stacking bodies in the basement,

The dreamer, the rebel, the romantic... you took them out back and shot them like Old Yeller because they were too loud for the dinner party.

Now you’re civilized. You’re polite. And you’re the only one left alive in a house full of ghosts.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“How paradoxical of her to understand and misunderstand me at the same time. It drives me mad.

I am inside her head, but I am utterly incapable of being in her life.

We are best friends in the gutter and total strangers in the light.

It’s the closest I’ve ever been to anyone, honestly
I feel like I’m yelling at her from the moon.

Nobody has ever felt so close yet distant.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“The strangest, most heartbreaking part about nostalgia is that the moments that actually haunt you felt completely ordinary when you were living them.

It’s just driving to the grocery store with the windows down.

It’s her burning the toast on a Tuesday morning and laughing about it.

While you were living it, it was just another boring Tuesday. You had no idea that you were standing right in the middle of a masterpiece.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“My love language is a a barrage of highly inappropriate dangerous questions.

I don't want the polite fiction of your day.

Because I am absolutely fascinated by the beautiful, tangled, chaotic mess inside your head.

I want to know what you think about at 3 AM when the world goes quiet and the anxiety creeps in.

So, Tell me about all the terrible, wonderful things you feel and never say out loud.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“So, somebody asked me the other day what’s my type is, right?

I actually prefer to be a little intellectually intimidated by the woman I love….

I want her sharp. I want her cunning. I want to look at her across the room and think, she is out of my league in ways I don't even understand yet.

I want to look into her eyes and feel utterly outmatched.

The kind of intellect that strips you bare, leaves you bleeding in the poetry of your own fucking ignorance.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”