79 Quotes by Sarah Smarsh

Mom would sacrifice true ownership and financial footing before she would sacrifice standard of living. Better to be in over your head with the bills in a house than own a trailer outright, she reasoned. It was all a game anyway, she said. The people making the rules were screwing around with debt bigger than she ever could. I can’t say that I completely agree.

In our obsession with home as a material thing, we forget that primal needs can be met even as the human spirit is hurt. Belonging is, on a psychological level, a primal need, too. It is often denied to the poor.

One develops a cunning to survive, whatever the shortage.

How can you talk about the poor child without addressing the country that let her be so? It’s a relatively new way of thinking for me. I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up. But it’s the way of things that environment changes outcomes. Or, to put it in my first language: The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.

I see so many things differently now. But we did as we had learned.

He had the gifts I would have wanted most for you: humor and generosity.

The violence men and sometimes women erupted with was usually born of stress and fear, or of their own parents’ violence.

Few people knew how much I was struggling both emotionally and financially, because I didn’t talk to anyone about it or even understand how bad off I was.

So much of childhood amounts to being awake in a grown-up’s nightmare. Ours happened to be about poverty, which comes with not just psychological dangers but mortal ones, too.