Stephen Bauer

“Each of us has something within us which won't be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that's all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, its self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.”
― Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds

“This is nothing more than the application of a universal law, a law in effect since the time human beings were human beings: “A person rediscovers himself in a living encounter.”17 But here, in the encounter with the presence of the Mystery become a human fact, this law is fulfilled, becomes definitively true, because “it is in an encounter that I become aware of myself…. The ‘I’ awakens from its imprisonment in its original womb, awakens from its tomb, from its sepulcher, from its closed situation of origin and—as it were—‘resurrects,’ becomes aware of itself, precisely in an encounter.”
― Julian Carron, Disarming Beauty: Essays on Faith, Truth, and Freedom

“Life is hunger, thirst, and passion for an ultimate object, which looms over the horizon, and yet always lies beyond it. When this is recognized, man becomes a tireless searcher.”
― Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense

“A feeling of sadness that only bus stations have.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road