Heartland 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“We were so invisible as to be misrepresented even in caricature, lumped in with other sorts of poor whites, derogatory terms applied to us even if they didn't make sense. We lived on the open prairie, so we weren't "roughnecks" in oil fields; Kansas had a humble tap on oil thousands of feet below the prairie, but nothing like Oklahoma or Texas to the south. "Redneck" and "cracker" didn't quite translate, since their American usage was rooted in the slave South, against which Kansas had lit many of the fires that sparked the Civil War.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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

“What was still preventable in the 1980s would, in a couple decades, become manifest; what once was treatable would become deadly. I'm not sure my immediate family's brushes with death when I was a kid-mom's hemorrhage in childbirth, Grandma's collapsed lung, Dad's chemical poisoning-would be survived today. Mom would have been less healthy going into labor, Grandma would have been sent home too soon for lack of insurance, Dad would have been given a cheaper and less effective treatment. The morality rate for poor rural women, in particular, has risen sharply over my lifetime. Health insurance had been around for a long time, of course, but the power of that industry had swelled up fast, transforming access to care and all the costs that come with it.”
― 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

“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

“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

“It was a severe serenity, doing whatever a moment required without complaint.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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, 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

“Work can be a true communion with resources, materials, other people. I have no issue with work. Its relationship to the economy—whose work is assigned what value—is where the trouble comes in. My family’s labor was undervalued to such an extent that, while we never starved or went without shelter in a chronic way, we all knew what it felt like to need something essential—food, shoes, a safe place to live, a rent payment, a trip to the doctor—and go without it for lack of money. That’s the sort of mess I wanted out of. That’s the sort of mess I never wanted you to experience.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“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, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“I kept you at arm’s length so long that the window for physical connection passed.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“A cycle had been broken, and the place it tore was between me and you.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

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

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

“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, 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