Top 80 Sarah Smarsh Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Society’s contempt for the poor becomes the poor person’s contempt for herself.”

— Sarah Smarsh

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Grandma was right: I did think I was too good for the environment I’d been born into. But I thought she was, too. I thought everyone was. So my intention was to get as much attention as often-but because I knew that was the only way I’d ever receive the chances I wanted.”

— Sarah Smarsh

5. “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

6. “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.”

— Sarah Smarsh

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “In negotiating a purchase price, he who cares the least, wins.”

— Sarah Smarsh

11. “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

12. “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

13. “The American economy is less like a dream supported by democracy than it is like an inconsistent god. Most of us, regardless of economic station, sacrifice a great deal to it.”

— Sarah Smarsh

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

— Sarah Smarsh

15. “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

16. “Old enough to swear that I would never suffer the way the women before me had – not at the hands of a man and not at the hands of an economy.”

— Sarah Smarsh

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

— Sarah Smarsh

18. “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.”

— Sarah Smarsh

19. “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.”

— Sarah Smarsh

20. “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.”

— Sarah Smarsh

21. “But that widening distance sometimes hurt.”

— Sarah Smarsh

22. “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:.”

— Sarah Smarsh

23. “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.”

— Sarah Smarsh

24. “To live alone in the country means isolation within isolation.”

— Sarah Smarsh

25. “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

26. “For those of us who were female, the body was also defined by its role as a potential mother. That’s true in every class but becomes more problematic in the context of financial struggle. 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

27. “To be made invisible as a class is an invalidation.”

— Sarah Smarsh

28. “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

29. “Stealing was wrong, I’d been taught in church and everywhere else, but I had a feeling that the money system was wrong, too. I didn’t think the world owed me everything, but it also seemed the world wouldn’t give me anything that I didn’t reach out and grab for myself. To do so, though, was both a mark of moral failure and something that could ruin my life, if I got caught.”

— Sarah Smarsh

30. “Transience was my mother’s family’s way by necessity-in part because of poverty, and in part because of mental illness that went untreated, also a function of poverty.”

— Sarah Smarsh

31. “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

32. “It wasn’t all bad, that poor rural place. Though money was scarce, you would have had your basic needs met because we knew how to grow and build things.”

— Sarah Smarsh

33. “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.”

— Sarah Smarsh

34. “Grandpa Arnie loved working the land not for the price of wheat per bushel but because smelling damp earth at sunrise felt like a holy experience.”

— Sarah Smarsh

35. “A cycle had been broken, and the place it tore was between me and you.”

— Sarah Smarsh

36. “I knew the difference between shelter and security. One eventually blows away, and the other exists only as a formless thing.”

— Sarah Smarsh

37. “In college, I began to understand the depth of the rift that is economic inequality.”

— Sarah Smarsh

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

— Sarah Smarsh

39. “Nothing was more painful to me than true things being denied.”

— Sarah Smarsh

40. “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

41. “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.”

— Sarah Smarsh

42. “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.”

— Sarah Smarsh

43. “As with other terms that have derogatory histories, reclaiming “redneck,” “trailer trash,” “hillbilly,” and so on is a sort of cultural self-defense, I guess. That is understandable enough. But I never would have put you in a shirt with any of those words on it. If such a trend existed when I was little, Mom wouldn’t have put me in one, either.”

— Sarah Smarsh

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

— Sarah Smarsh

45. “Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness.”

— Sarah Smarsh

46. “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

47. “Betty and Arnie danced two or three songs. He smelled like Old Spice aftershave, and she liked his happy laugh. They agreed that every Johnny Cash song was the same damn tune with different words.”

— Sarah Smarsh

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

— Sarah Smarsh

49. “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

50. “Having no money looks and feels different in different places.”

— Sarah Smarsh