More Than This

by Patrick Ness

A world made of words, Seth thinks, where you live for a while.

The loneliness. In his accumulating exhaustion, the terrible loneliness of this place swamps him, just like the waves he drowned in.

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

“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.”

“There’s always beauty,” he said. “If you know where to look.”

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.”

“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.”

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

People who looked at the world in a completely different way and by doing so, made it different.