79 Quotes by Sarah Smarsh

Theirs was not a world where natural gifts and interests decide your profession.

I felt both the treasures of isolation for a strange girl and all the things an independent, thinking woman stood to lose.

I liked how hospitals made people well behaved, as did libraries, Sunday Mass, and funerals.

I answered the question of whether I deserved to exist by working hard:.

Dad, however, didn’t take even the most benign aspirin – not thinking it harmful or ineffective but suspecting it amounted to money spent on something your body and mind could do on their own, for free and without side effects. Dad had a quiet inner life as a self-healer. Once in a while he shared it with me, and in that way he was the most maternal force in my life.

Perhaps most important to our family’s happier endings was that, while Betty had plenty of good excuses to become a bitter, cynical person, she had somehow preserved her natural outlook on the world: that justice is worth fighting for, and the notion of a better life is always worth a shot.

But I am not sorry that you never experienced the dangers of being devalued outside those farmhouse walls.