The New Stranger Quotes

“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”

“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”

“They don't tell you about the curse of travelling.
You went out there and saw the colors, tasted the wine, saw the chaos.
You expanded our minds until they couldn't fit back into these little boxes people call ‘NORMAL lives.'
Now, the local gossip feels petty. The 9-to-5 feels like a cage.
It’s the curse of the wanderer. You fit in everywhere, so you don't fit in anywhere.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“Funny of you to never know which moments become core memories.

You spend your whole life trying to orchestrate these perfect, cinematic moments.

The kiss in the rain. The grand gesture.
But then... it’ll be a random Tuesday.

You’re just sitting on the floor eating cold takeout, and she laughs at something stupid you said with her mouth full.

And you don’t know it yet, but you are going to be thinking about that exact laugh on your deathbed.

It's beautiful, but... it is a ruthless trick of the mind.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I want to read every goddamn book ever written.

I want to watch every movie, travel to every forgotten corner of the map,

I want to love every beautiful, complicated woman on this earth.

But you can’t. Because one life is just unfairly, criminally small.

So what do you do?

You just try to drink the ocean through a straw,
and hope you don't drown.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”