79 Quotes by Sarah Smarsh

I was a reader, when I could get ahold of something to read, and literature showed me places I’d never seen. Another art form, though, showed me my own place: country music. Its sincere lyrics and familiar accent confirmed, with triumph and sorrow, that my home – invisible or ridiculed elsewhere in news and popular culture – deserved to be known, and that it was complicated and good.

The poverty I felt most, then, was a scarcity of the heart, a near-constant state of longing for the mother right in front of me yet out of reach. She withheld the immense love she had inside her like children of the Great Depression hoarded coins. Being her child, I had no choice but to be emotionally impoverished with her. I offered to rub her back every day so that I could touch her skin.

The defining feeling of my childhood was that of being told there wasn’t a problem when I knew damn well there was.

Class was not discussed, let alone understood. This meant that, for a child of my disposition-given to prodding every family secret, to sifting through old drawers for clues about the mysterious people I loved-every day had the quiet underpinning of frustration. The defining feeling of my childhood was that of being told there wasn’t a problem when I knew damn well there was.

I see it now as a day she barely survived because society valued productivity and autonomy more than it valued women and children.

I had no choice but to understand that people can demean and hit you and in their better moments love you, at once be a mess themselves and carry a deep pride in your strange togetherness. They suffered from weakness of character, yes-just like every other person, in every other income bracket. What really put shame on us wasn’t our moral deficit. It was our money deficit.

Economic power is social power. In the end, for all her hard work and tenacity, the poor woman lacks both.

Your problems as a working-class girl would have included true peril.

To be made invisible as a class is an invalidation.