Notes From Exile Quotes

“Honor is a concept invented by the winning side to make the losing side feel better about getting their teeth kicked in. If some suit tries to take what’s yours, you don’t challenge him to a gentleman’s duel. You find his weakness, you find out what he loves, and you hit him there so hard he forgets his own bloody name. You go scorched earth. You make sure he never, ever tries to come back at you again.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I don’t care if they have a badge, a billion dollars, or a mandate from the Queen herself. Power attracts the worst kind of psychopaths. If someone tells you they have power over you 'for your own good,' you tell them to fuck off, and you watch your back.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I am terrified that I am going to raise glass children in a world of hammers. I see the way kids are raised today. Insulated from failure. Protected from pain. Given trophies just for breathing. It is the most dangerous thing you can do to a human being.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“Live a little, before you’re gone, because the clock is ticking, and the reaper always, always wins.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“Your death ain't gonna be some grand, dramatic exit. It will come on an ordinary, aggressively mundane day, right in the dead middle of your meticulously unfinished plans. You’re gonna drop dead on a random, unremarkable Tuesday afternoon. You’ll be in the middle of complaining about the traffic, or worrying about your 401k, or drafting an email to someone you don't even like. You're gonna leave behind a half-finished to-do list pinned to the fridge with a cheap magnet. There will be wet laundry sitting in the dryer. You will die with a whole lot of 'somedays' still tucked uselessly in your pocket.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“Everybody thinks they're gonna get a polite, formally drafted two-week notice before the lights go out. It’s a tragic, hilarious joke. The Grim Reaper doesn't care about your schedule.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I used you to keep the loneliness away on Tuesdays. I watched the light go out in your eyes, and I didn't stop because I was too busy falling in love with my own sadness.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“You were the last person to see me before I put on the mask.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I’m sorry I got away. I had to. I was terrified of a simple life and I was too young to know that you don't find people like you twice.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I don’t remember your middle name, but I remember the way the light hit your hair and how the world paused when you smiled.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“There is the kind of death that puts you in the ground, and then there is the morning after you let someone you love go.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“It is the most wicked torture of the modern age—to be completely, violently shattered by someone who technically owes you absolutely nothing!”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“Being attached to someone you never actually had is a special kind of purgatory. It’s a waiting room in hell where the numbers are never called. You are a victim of a disaster that is entirely undocumented. You can't even claim the wreckage to the rest of the world, because technically, officially, the ship never sailed.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“What do you mean we never dated, and yet I am still not over you?”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“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.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I have engineered my entire existence around the belief that if I didn't bleed for it, it ain’t fucking mine.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I simply do not believe I’m allowed to have the thing unless I utterly destroy myself to get it.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I don’t know how to like things. I only know how to obsess until I absolutely ruin them or they ruin me. There is no middle ground.”
― 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”

“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 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”

“Honestly? I actually prefer to be a little intellectually intimidated by the women I love.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“While the girl to my right places one final bet. She's praying I carry the cash for the room, As we hide from the dawn and the impending gloom.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“But real travel—It makes you a permanent exile. You are too changed to fit back into the mold of your old life, but you are too inherently foreign to ever truly belong to the places you visit. You become a ghost, haunting airports and hotel bars, perpetually looking for that next hit of pure, unfiltered reality.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“It happens the second you leave the reservation. Not for a vacation. Not for a resort where they speak English and bring you drinks with little umbrellas. The world stops being a globe sitting on a teacher’s desk and becomes a living, breathing, bleeding animal. You see how big it is. You see how terrifyingly small you are.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“Once you’ve stood on a street corner where you don't speak the language, and the world is screaming at you in colors you’ve never seen... you fucking change.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I’ve ruined myself for a normal life. I know that now. And I didn't do it with drugs, or a scandalous affair, but I’ve ruined myself the old-fashioned way: I packed my bags, left the house, got on a plane, and flew across an ocean.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“There is a strange, narcotic kind of peace in the idea of starting over somewhere where no one expects a goddamn thing from you.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I fucking romanticize the idea of disappearing forever. I don’t mean checking out early, pulling a Hemingway with the shotgun, leaving a mess for the maid and a legacy for the critics to pick over like vultures on a roadside carcass. That’s too final. That’s too loud. I’m talking about the fade out. The slow dissolve. I’m talking about the Great Vanishing Act.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I fucking romanticize the idea of disappearing forever.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”