If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe (John Dies at the End, #4)

by Jason Pargin

When I daydream about having money, it’s not about jewelry and Jacuzzis and Jet Skis. I dream about having that unseen cushion, that margin of error I can just take for granted.

But I’d kill to have that, the luxury of worrying about the future. At our level, you don’t get to think beyond this month’s bills. Looking too far ahead is dangerous, like trying to read a map while you’re driving. So we get locked into a loop where the best possible future is one that looks exactly like our present.

Amy’s most common dream was one where she finds out her family is still alive, like she runs into them at the grocery store and learns that it had all been a mix-up at the hospital somehow.

some people just struggle to understand that the whole universe does not revolve around their problems.

If you reply that surely an all-knowing God can still see to it that all is well for everyone involved, I would tend to agree. But I would then ask you to imagine what a devil would do with the same power.

We all made choices and here we are, all still alive, all able to make more choices. That’s the best you’re going to get, the chance to keep trying. If it turns out it’s all an illusion or a dream or whatever, so what? Your choices are your choices, they’re the only thing that’s real because they’re the only part you can control.”

You try to end it, and instead of release, it’s just waves of trauma.