Compound Fracture Book Quotes

If I promise this book has a happy ending, does that make it better? Does that make any of it easier to swallow?

I've been mad at the world for a long time. It’s hard not to be mad at the world when you're eleven years old and everyone you know is suffering, when your mother cries herself to sleep and you can recognize your father's hospital room by the smell of his blood. But the summer before my sophomore year, I learned my great-great-grandfather was a socialist, and suddenly I had the words for why I wanted to bum it all down. Because none of this is real. It's real but it ain't real, it ain't real the way mountains or the rings inside a tree are real. You can't open a book on the laws of physics and find a chapter labeled "Exploiting Workers for Profit and Killing Them When They Ask You to Stop." It's fake! Someone made it up! Workers are exploited, rent is astro-nomical, the cost of healthcare is life-destroying not because they are the path a river carves through a canyon, but because some capitalist fuckers decided they wanted it this way.

Once you start asking, Why has human history created an economic system that loves profit and power more than people, which will always lead to disasters like the mine collapse and the violence that followed?--once you start asking, What went so wrong in society that bastards like Sheriff Davies are allowed to exist in the first place?--the answers taste like sand in your mouth. It's all so far back that the response becomes "Because that's how it is." I ain't mad at Paul; I'm mad at the world that put us here, I've been mad at the world for a long time. It's hard not to be mad at the world when you're eleven years old and everyone you know is suffering, when your mother cries herself to sleep and you can recognize your father's hospital room by the smell of his blood. But the summer before my sophomore year, I learned my great-great-grandfather was a socialist and suddenly I had the words for why I wanted to burn it all down. Because none of this is real. It's real but it ain't real, it ain't real the way mountains or the rings inside a tree are real. You can't open a book on the laws of physics and find a chapter "Exploiting Workers for Profit and Killing Them When They Ask You to Stop." It's fake! Someone made it up! Workers are exploited, rent is astronomical, the cost of healthcare is life-destroying not because they are the path a river carves through a canyon, but because some capitalist fuckers decided they wanted it this way.

Remember all those books I read? The romances I tried to use as road maps, a clinical list of how things work? They ain't prepared me for this. For someone to touch you when you're raw like an exposed nerve, when you're still shaky from the adrenaline high, when you can still taste the air of the mineshaft. When you don't feel all that much different from a dead body yourself.