Sarah Smarsh > Quotes

“Society’s contempt for the poor becomes the poor person’s contempt for herself.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“Maybe it’s no coincidence that Parton’s popularity seemed to surge the same year America seemed to falter. A fractured thing craves wholeness, and that’s what Dolly Parton offers—one woman who simultaneously embodies past and present, rich and poor, feminine and masculine, Jezebel and Holy Mother, the journey of getting out and the sweet return to home.”
― Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

“There's a powerful wisdom in just leaving the bullshit for someone else to fix.”
― Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

“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.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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.”
― Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

“When she told me the story, it was about a day she barely survived because of my dad’s absence. I see it now as a day she barely survived because society valued productivity and autonomy more than it valued women and children.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“Theirs was not a world where natural gifts and interests decide your profession.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“To be made invisible as a class is an invalidation.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“He had the gifts I would have wanted most for you: humor and generosity.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“Women saying “my nerves are shot” was the closest anyone came to examining the situation. What they didn’t discuss, though, they felt. That’s what substances were for.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“But that widening distance sometimes hurt.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“The woman who speaks about feminism is not always the one truly insisting on equality behind closed doors.”
― Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

“Economic power is social power. In the end, for all her hard work and tenacity, the poor woman lacks both.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“Parton’s musical genius deserves a discussion far beyond and above the matters of gender and class. But the lyrics she wrote are forever tied to the body that sang them, her success forever tied to having patterned her look after the “town trollop” of her native holler. For doing so, she received a fame laced with ridicule; during interviews in the 1970s and 1980s, both Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey asked her to stand up so they could point out, without humor, that she looked like a tramp.”
― Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

“In negotiating a purchase price, he who cares the least, wins.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“We would be able to map our lives against the destruction of the working class: the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health care, the defunding of public schools, wages so stagnant that full-time workers could no longer pay the bills. Historic wealth inequality was old news to us by the time it hit newspapers in the new millennium.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“When I found your name, in my early adulthood, I don't think I'd ever heard the term "white working class". The experience it describes contains both racial privilege and economic disadvantage, which can exist simultaneously. This was an obvious, apolitical fact for those of us who lived that juxtaposition every day. But it seemed tomake some people uneasy, as though our grievance put us in competition with poor people of other races. Wealthy white people, in particular, seemed to want to distance themselves from our place and our truth. Our struggles forced a question about America that many were not willing to face: If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn't racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“Our sense that our struggles were our own fault, our acceptance of the way things were, helped keep American industry humming to the benefit of the wealthy.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“Political headlines were fixating on a hateful, sexist version of rural, working-class America that I did not recognize. Dolly’s music and life contained what I wanted to say about class, gender, and my female forebears: That country music by women was the formative feminist text of my life.”
― Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

“I felt both the treasures of isolation for a strange girl and all the things an independent, thinking woman stood to lose.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“The violence men and sometimes women erupted with was usually born of stress and fear, or of their own parents’ violence.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth