Best Of Sarah Smarsh's Bone of the Bone
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class by Sarah Smarsh
It can be useful to acknowledge the cultural forces that carve us, or edifying to indulge in the tropes of our assigned narratives, but true distinctions of character, intelligence, talent, and skill exist at the level of the individual, not of the class— or the ethnicity, the gender, the sexual orientation, the religion, and so on. To claim otherwise, as we've discovered across time and countless persecutions of our own doing, is at best an insult and at worst an excuse for enslavement and genocide.
p. 50
We don't consume news all day because we're hungry for information; we consume it because we're hungry for connection. That's the confusing conundrum for the twenty-first-century heart and mind: to be at once overinformed and grasping for meaning.
p. 58
Objective hardship hones a keen sense of the difference, and chose for whom reality has been the least pleasant are often the most loyal to its preservation.
p. 76-77
This, perhaps, is the deepest challenge in articulating and considering the stories of our lives: not that they force us to admit our privileges but that they force us to admit our suf-fering. If we see something, it must be real, and some realities hurt to look at. Therefore, our harshest critics are often those with whom we share the most common ground.
p. 77
In matters of truth, much has been said of the memoirist's responsibility in wielding accuracy; much less has been said of the reader's responsibility in wielding belief. Belief is a form of reverence; disbelief, a form of rejection. Both can be destructive when unexamined: blind faith might give power where it's not due, while blind doubt might strip away power where it's needed most. Whether we stick out our tongues to deny or savour another person's claims, the revelation is about ourselves.
p. 78
Unusual destinations require unusual routes, and an unusual route is by definition an unpopulous one. Big or unorthodox goals therefore require a trade-off: the closer you get to them, the farther you are from other people-if not in terms of geography, then in terms of understanding. With whom could Neil Armstrong, first person on the moon, share memories of walking in lunar dust? Very few people-but only he will ever be first. The more exceptional the achievement, the more supreme the trade-off. With whom might Oprah, who journeyed from poor, rural Mississippi to historic heights of media influence, specifically relate? Only one person—Oprah—who I'd wager has grappled with loneliness despite a career built, ironically, on her relatability.
p. 90-91
The people lonely at the top by way of its sparse population were probably lonely at the bottom for different reasons. One who takes a strange road likely was strange to her home. Her disconnect from her tribe—by intellect, interests, spirit, or something else—is what propelled her into the journey, perhaps, and her ability to tolerate the discomfort of loneliness is precisely what qualified her to get where few can go. To be emotionally apart, somehow, from one's family or hometown is to live in constant awareness of contrast between oneself and the very group in which one most naturally might belong. For all the love in the world, that belonging can never be fully achieved. But in the space where it might have been, something rarer has a chance to grow: a deep, indelible knowing of one's individual power. If you can survive a gulf with the very womb that brought you, you can survive the gulf between the comfort of the familiar and the terror of any unknown, between where you came from and where you're going
p. 91
A psychologist once told me-saying, perhaps, the same thing as the astrologer but with a PhD-"You came in at a different frequency."
Emitting that strange frequency, I've learned how far a signal might have to travel before it's heard. I spent most of my childhood feeling like there was an actual lump in my throat; our German-Catholic farm-scape tamped emotional expression and often shamed aspirations in a place where it's safer not to dream.
p. 94
One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread.
p. 112
When it comes to economic risk, what appears reckless to the privileged is often the smartest bet to the poor.
p. 127
Where the limitations of individual experience beget tribal-ism, we might summon the power of information and education to help us transcend our own groups and narrow visions of the world.
p. 161
One doesn't need a degree to know the difference between love and hate, right and wrong. One does, in a world of racist messages, need unbiased facts to form a worldview that does not favour Whiteness.
p. 162
Those best able to document our socioeconomic divide with humility and accuracy typically have occupied more than one class, remain connected to the one they left, and attribute any upward mobility to good fortune rather than to personal exceptionalism.
p. 191
In this way, Tightrope avoids a problem common among books about places authors have "escaped." Yamhill is not reflected through a rearview mirror, distorted by a removed author's guilt, resentment, or nostalgia. Rather, it is conveyed up close by way of detailed reporting on living people-intimate access achieved because the authors, while outliers with respect to their professional status and home on the opposite coast, are also of the place.*
p. 192
You can be intellectually woke without being awakened to the largest truth: that we are all connected, enemies and allies alike. The United States is teetering toward authoritarianism. Are you still lecturing strangers on social media? Are you still shouting at a family member that they're wrong? How is that working out? If you want to stop fascism, the efficient mission is not to attack the opposing side. It is, rather, to be the opposite of Donald Trump: a defiantly open heart who protects and bolsters valid information systems required for people to truly decide for themselves about all that he and his movement represent. If you think such information is a given in the world we are living in, you are mistaken.
p. 210-211
We must approach the current political crisis less like a valid debate and more like the treatment of a toxic stream along which extremist factions swirl into themselves like eddies. You and the person you're arguing with don't even share a common set of definitions, let alone discussion frameworks or world-views. No movement can win in the twenty-first century without this understanding as a foundation.
To clear that toxic stream, we need robustly funded schools with civics curricula that activate participation in democracy, tell the story of all peoples, admit our often brutal history as a nation, and incorporate twenty-first-century media literacy as an essential tool of citizenship. We need government crackdowns on big tech's complicity in the spread of misinformation.
p. 215
We should value justice over unity. But there is more unity to be had than you might think from watching the news. People change, and privileged Americans who can help them do so play an important role in this pivotal moment.
p. 215
In a July opinion piece for the New York Times, Charlie Warzel described a Senegalese medical anthropologist sent by the World Health Organization to Guinea, where residents were resisting public health guidance during the Ebola epidemic in 2014. He spent a long time listening, rather than lecturing, and realized that the people "weren't selfish or anti-science. They were scared and felt stripped of dignity by officials who didn't respect them or understand their traditions."
p. 215
Stutts, who has worked for the postal service for forty-five years, noted that the aging demographics of rural communities mean that mail carriers often keep an eye on seniors, sometimes in communication with adult children who have moved away. Rural carriers consider themselves first responders, he said, ada-ing that they might be tasked with delivering coronavirus-related medications in the near future.
p. 222
The much-discussed financial crisis surrounding the USPS today has unique significance for rural delivery. The essential democratic backbone of the agency-guaranteeing the same postage rate for all Americans, regardless of their location-is not profitable. To maintain their own bottom lines, Amazon, UPS, FedEx, and other private delivery companies contract the service for "last mile" delivery to far-flung customers.
p. 223
Hateful dismissals of those with low incomes, dirty jobs, or "uneducated" backgrounds leave us unable to recognize that such people not only are capable of governing but possess insights necessary for fixing systemic woes from which they have suffered-problems that our credentialed leaders often have a vested interest in failing to solve. I was raised by intelligent people whose creative problem-solving, honed not by textbook theories but by lifelong fights to survive, might have made them fine policymakers.
p. 266
The pen is not more powerful than the AR-I5, under-regulated carbon emissions, unsustainable consumption, xenophobia, unlivable wages, nationalism, the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex, the medical industrial complex, or dark money's political influence. It is, however, antecedent to some future world that will not abide these things. Of all the reasons that I have dedicated my life to witnessing intergenerational poverty and trauma—a process that has enriched me professionally but that requires an incessant, unpleasant reconnection with the painful past I overcame--the most fundamental is that I dream of a world in which no child suffers for our country's greed.
p. 286-287
Real love requires true attention-seeing another being for what they are, rather than casting upon them projections of our own pain. This love holds the power to remove not just the selfish veils that harm domestic relationships but the ancient, disastrous veils of the world: stereotypes, hateful prejudice, ugly cartoons.
p. 307
