Rody Salas

“But events can unfold in such a manner that overnight the man out of step finds himself in the right place at the right time. The fashions and attitudes that had seemed so alien to him are suddenly swept aside and supplanted by fashions and attitudes in perfect sympathy with his deepest sentiments. Then, like a lone sailor adrift for years on alien seas, he wakes one night to discover familiar constellations overhead.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“No one captures the consequences of choosing that level of self-protection over love better than C. S. Lewis: To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
― Brené Brown, Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.

“She snatched at my wrist with surprising speed, and dragged my hand onto her thigh, near the hip. The flesh was warm and smooth and supple. Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch as the skin of a woman’s thigh. No flower, feather, or fabric can match that velvet whisper of flesh. No matter how unequal they may be in other ways, all women, old and young, fat and thin, beautiful and ugly, have that perfection. It’s a great part of the reason why men hunger to possess women, and so often convince themselves that they do possess them: the thigh, that touch.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“no leaders invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
don’t slough in the slime.
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
stay out of the clutches of mediocrity and
self-pity. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
change your tone and shape so that they can
never
find you. recharge yourself.
accept continuance
but only on the terms that you have invented
and reinvented. be self-instructed. invent life,
it is you,
the history of its past and
the presence of its presentness.
there is nothing else,
nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Essential Bukowski: Poetry