79 Quotes by Sarah Smarsh

There is, then, intellectual knowledge--the stuff of research studies and think pieces--and there is experiential knowing. Both are important, and women from all backgrounds might possess both. But we rarely exalt the knowing, which is the only kind of feminism many working women have.

There's a powerful wisdom in just leaving the bullshit for someone else to fix.

If you live in a house that needs shingles, you will attend a school that needs books, and while sitting in that school's desk you'll struggle to focus because your tooth needs a dentist or your stomach needs food.

I kept you at arm’s length so long that the window for physical connection passed.

Society’s contempt for the poor becomes the poor person’s contempt for herself.

Along with the freedom and the space, that is a blessing you would have received from the feral way that children among us lived: seeing blood every day on a kitten’s neck, a father’s hand, the ground beneath a slaughtered hog hanging from a hook. Knowing in your own bones how fragile and fleeting a body is.

But the American Dream has a price tag on it. The cost changes depending on where you’re born and to whom, with what color skin and with how much money in your parents’ bank account. The poorer you are, the higher the price. You can pay an entire life in labor, it turns out, and have nothing to show for it. Less than nothing, even: debt, injury, abject need.

Grandma was right: I did think I was too good for the environment I’d been born into. But I thought she was, too. I thought everyone was. So my intention was to get as much attention as often-but because I knew that was the only way I’d ever receive the chances I wanted.

Poverty makes motherhood harder, and motherhood makes poverty harder. Single mothers and their children are, by far, the poorest type of family in the United States.