More Than This

A book… it’s a world all on its own too. A world made of words, where you live for a while.

Know yourself and go in swinging.

Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.

We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there's always more than this. There's always something you don't know.

I wanted so badly for there to be more. I ached for there to be more than my crappy little life.' He shakes his head. 'And there was more. I just couldn't see it.

There's always beauty, if you know where to look.

People see stories everywhere...We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true...We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

But,' he thinks, 'it's possible to die before you die.

People ask for what they need in different ways. Sometimes by not even asking for it at all.

He's seeing the actual Milky Way streaked across the sky. The whole of his entire galaxy, right there in front of him. Billions and billions of stars. Billions and billions of worlds. All of them, all of those seemingly endless possibilities, not fictional, but real, out there, existing, right now. There is so much more out there than just the world he knows, so much more than his tiny Washington town, so much more than even London. Or England. Or hell, for that matter. So much more that he'll never see. So much more that he'll never get to. So much that he can only glimpse enough of to know that it's forever beyond his reach.

But imagine there’s this thing that always sits there in the room with you. And everyone knows it’s there and no one will ever say a single goddamn word about it until it becomes like an extra person living in your house that you have to make room for. And if you bring it up, they pretend they don’t know what you’re talking about.

It was solitude, but it was solitude that wasn't lonely. Solitude that could sort things out. And he hadn't had that in ages.

Life does not have to go how you think it will,” Tomasz says. “Not even when you are very sure what is going to happen.

He wanted something, he realizes now. Wanted an answer other than the ones he’d been given. Wanted to find out this whole world had some purpose, some particular purpose. For him.

Seth,” she says, “wherever you are, it’s okay. You can come back from it. Whatever happened to you down there, whatever the world looks like now, that’s not how it always looks. That’s not how it’s always going to look. There’s more. There’s always more. Whatever you see, wherever you are, we’re still here with you. Me and Tommy.

And love and care have all kinds of different faces, and within them, there’s room for understanding, and for forgiveness, and for more.

Something I chose to forget because it didn’t fit in with how shit everything was.

No, life didn't always go how you thought it might. Sometimes it didn't make any sense at all. You've just got to find a way to live there anyway...

Whatever the world looks like now. That's not always how it's going to look. There's more. There's always more.

Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too.

People see stories everywhere,” Regine says. “That’s what my father used to say. We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn’t true.” She glances back at Seth. “We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.

And at first it's okay, you know, not perfect, but okay, and you get used to it. Then it gets a little worse, and you get used to that, too. Then one day, you wake up and you don't have the first freakin' clue how it got that bad.

How do you like them apples, you piece of shit?

Now that I know there’s more? I want to have more. If there really is more to life, I want to live all of it. And why shouldn’t all of us? Don’t we deserve that?

He’s uncertain what’s going to happen next. But he is certain that that’s actually the point. If this is all a story, then that’s what the story means. If it isn’t a story, then the exact same is true. But as his friends begin the final steps, pressing buttons, answering questions on a screen, he thinks that what is forever certain is that there’s always more. Always.

What I do know is that if you give a human being a chance to be stupid and violent, then they're going to take it, every time. No matter where they are.

Oh, it was real, all right,” she says. “We lived it; we were there. If you go through something and put up with it even if you want to get away from it more than anything in the whole world, then it was definitely bloody real.

There’s always beauty,” Seth murmurs. “If you know where to look.