79 Quotes by Sarah Smarsh

Blue-collar workers” have jobs requiring just as much brainpower as “white-collar professionals.” To run a family farm is to be a business owner in a complicated industry. But, unlike many jobs requiring smarts and creativity, working a farm summons the body’s intelligence, too.

The worse danger is not the job itself but the devaluing of those who do it. A society that considers your body dispensable will inflict a violence upon you. Working in a field is one thing; being misled by a corporation about the safety of a carcinogenic pesticide is another. Hammering on a roof is one thing; not being able to afford a doctor when you fall off it is another.

He had left the farm in someone else’s hands for the weekend – the first time I’d seen him do so in my entire life – and that told me how much he cared.

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. No matter who you are or what you started with, though, your fortunes are not assured.

Anger was not Jeannie’s true self, I’d learn as she aged. But, as tends to happen with people who are beaten down by daily circumstances, my young mother’s core nature was glimpsed only in moments of life and death:.

But there was a beautiful efficiency to it – form in constant physical function with little energy left over. In some ways, I feel enriched rather than diminished for having lived it.

To live alone in the country means isolation within isolation.

They had a confidence in their own intuition, a sort of knowing deeper than schooling can render and higher than the dogma of a church. If they could bear the pain of experiencing their world long enough, without numbing themselves, they had what you might call “powers.

In that way, my family and our class might have been the least fazed by America’s obsession with wealth. As workers living at the taproot of the agricultural economy, we not only could grow and build our own necessities – we also understood the hard work a loaf of bread represented and thus put less faith in the money that bought it than in the bread itself.