Living Is More than Surviving as expressed in Literature.
- Ascendance of a Bookworm: Myne's very first option to get treatment for her Devouring entails both being Made a Slave in all but name and getting separated from her family. She refuses it and chooses to spend the time she has left with her family. The main reason she manages to last much longer is that she finds a way to get treatment all while being able to still live in her home during the period she was treating as borrowed time.
- The novelization of the Babylon 5 film "Thirdspace" has a conversation about this between an old man and his dying brother's ex-wife.Alex Rosen: Survival, Sheila? Is that what it's all about? Is that the only thing that matters? Survival is the fundamental instinct of all living things, Sheila. It doesn't take any great thinker, any deep philosopher, just to survive. Cockroaches, they're survivors. Scientists say the cockroaches will outlast us all. Good for them. They'll still be around when we're long-forgotten piles of dust, but you know what? They'll still be cockroaches. You want to be a cockroach, Sheila? Fine.
- The second book of The Dark Elf Trilogy starts with Drizzt realizing that after ten years of surviving alone in the Underdark, he is becoming too much of an instinct-driven animal.
- In the Philip K. Dick short story "The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree", Joe Contemptible is driven to despair by his unfulfilling life:"I'm not married. I've got no wife. Nothing. Just my damn job at the record store. All those damn German songs and those bubblegum rock lyrics; they go through my head night and day, constantly, mixtures of Goethe and Heine and Neil Diamond. ... So why should I live on? Call that living? It's existence, not living."
- Discussed by Dresden and Ortega in Death Masks:I thought you guys drank blood," I said.
"It's all we really need," Ortega said.
"Then why do you have anything else?"
Ortega held up the bottle. "Life is more than mere survival. All you need is the water, after all. Why drink beer?"
(Later that conversation...)
"The offer to make me into a blood-drinking monster in eternal slavery to you? Why would I want to do that?"
"It is the only way to keep your life," Ortega said.
I felt the anger coalescing into rage. My upper lip curled away from my teeth, baring them in a snarl. "I thought life is more than mere survival."
Ortega's expression changed. It was only for a second, but in that moment I saw furious rage, arrogant pride, and violent bloodlust on his face. He regained his calm quickly, but traces of the hidden emotions thickened his accent.
"So be it. I will kill you, wizard." - This trope is discussed in the poem, Dialysis, where the subject's living functions are mostly artificial and, while she isn't dead, she's doesn't really consider herself alive, either, as she's only surviving due the machines in which she's attached to and can't do anything besides lay there and count down how long until the machines stop functioning.
- A central theme in The Giver: Jonas comes to realize that the community gave up genuine emotion and humanity for an emotionally sterile, functional utopia.
- The prophecy about Harry Potter and the Dark Lord in Harry Potter implies this: "Neither can live while the other survives", ie. Harry and Voldemort have a vendetta that can't be resolved without violence, and so long as they're both alive, neither will know peace because the other is dedicated to destroying them. Both can survive, but as long as they do, neither can live.
- A recurring theme in Shtetl Days is that, even in the hyper-paranoid security state of the Reich, plenty of people skirt or lightly break the rules in ways that can get them thrown in jail or killed on the spot, because life isn't worth living otherwise.
- In A Song of Ice and Fire, living free even against impossible odds or in terrible danger of death is a central tenet of wildling culture; notably, they call themselves "the Free Folk." When Jon Snow argues that Mance Rayder's attack on the Wall is futile and the attackers must certainly die, wildling Ygritte responds that all men must die, "but not all men truly live."
- In Station Eleven the motto of the Traveling Symphony is "Survival is Insufficient". Most people in the post-apocalyptic world would be surprised that it comes from Star Trek: Voyager of all things.
- This is the Aesop of David Hopkins' Thebe and the Angry Red Eye, in which Thomas is the Sole Survivor of a space disaster. He tries to deal with his loneliness and isolation by using a tomato plant called Oscar as a Companion Cube, which leads to this "conversation":Thomas: Finally, I got to the heart of my depression. When we were traveling through the stars, I was doing something; I was being someone. I was being alive. After the crash, all I've been doing is surviving. Is surviving really the same as living?
"No. We died in the crash." Oscar let that hang in the air for a time, and I considered the possibility. "We died in the crash, and we haven't been alive since because we've been concerning ourselves with merely surviving."
To survive, it's just not enough. - In the Warrior Cats Super Edition Firestar's Quest, Leaf uses this as a reason as to why they should join the new SkyClan."Yes, I'll join," Leaf assured him. "If the Clan really works how you say it will, then cats will have a purpose. We'll be more than just rogues, just living to stay alive."
- A major theme in We The Living.Kira Argounova:: “Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I'm alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want—isn't that life itself? And who—in this damned universe—who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want?”
“She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came.”
