Quotes & Sayings About Iowa

Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she'd ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn't very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her). — Jane Smiley

You need to make a trip to Des Moines in August, because the Iowa State Fair really is a sight to see. The Iowa Fairgrounds are usually packed for those 11 days, and you get a real sense of what a classic Midwest fair is all about. — Zach Johnson

Iowa has sent notice that the Republican nominee for the next president of the United States will not be chosen by the media. Will not be chosen by the Washington establishment. Will not be chosen by the lobbyists. But will be chosen by the most incredible powerful force, where all sovereignty resides in our nation by we the people. — Ted Cruz

I've been looking at some video clips on YouTube of President Obama - then candidate Obama - going through Iowa making promises. The gap between his promises and his performance is the largest I've seen, well, since the Kardashian wedding and the promise of 'til death do we part. — Mitt Romney

Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. "Wow!" he said, and then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride
the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes
from two-fifty to four-fifteen
and told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosi, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he'd sold his own 1940 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa. — Truman Capote

In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa. — Bill Bryson

When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone. — Edward Hirsch

What is this place? Heaven? You're supposed to say, "It's Iowa. — Rainbow Rowell

The people of Cody like you to think that Buffalo Bill was a native son. In fact, I'm awfully proud to tell you, he was an Iowa native, born in the little town of Le Claire in 1846. The people of Cody, in one of the more desperate commercial acts of this century, bought Buffalo Bill's birthplace and re-erected it in their town, but they are lying through their teeth when they hint that he was a local. And the thing is, they have a talented native son of their own. Jackson Pollock, the artist, was born in Cody. But they don't make anything of that because, I suppose, Pollock was a complete wanker when it came to shooting buffalo. — Bill Bryson

Secret Service agents detained an Iowa man with a gun who happened to be walking in a Des Moines park where President Bush was jogging. Were they out of their minds? White guys with guns put Bush in the White House. — Argus Hamilton

The Iowa Women's Health Study, which has followed more than 35,000 women for decades, found eating more broccoli, cauliflower, kale and other cruciferous vegetables was associated with a lower risk of getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in the first place. — Michael Greger

They could stay in Iowa. Lots of people do that. Millions of them, like four million of them, stay in Iowa, year after year. — Dean Bakopoulos

Give me all of you, and I'll give you back yourself when we have finished.
And in the high country she had screamed aloud in some combination of fear and pleasure. And she had done that once more in a bed in Iowa, then turned the scream into a dwindling, involuntary cry for all the things she had once felt and now felt again with another strange man who lived in his own far places. — Robert James Waller

I'm not cutting services. But I'm cutting spending. But I may cut Department of Education. I believe common core is a very bad thing. I believe that we should be lo - you know, educating our children from Iowa, from New Hampshire, from South Carolina, from California, from New York. I think that it should be local education. — Donald Trump

I have never understood the Iowa caucus. — Larry King

I arrived at my hut in Beverly Hills just in time to keep real estate men from plotting off and selling my front yard. They will sell you anything or anybody's in the world as long as they can get a first payment ... It used to be only Iowa that was out here but now they have three or four adjoining states interested and they are here, too. Real estate agents - you never saw as many in your life; they are as thick as bootleggers. — Will Rogers

Some years ago Professor Patrick, of the Iowa State University, kept three young men awake for four days and nights. When his observations on them were finished, the subjects were permitted to sleep themselves out. All awoke from this sleep completely refreshed, but the one who took longest to restore himself from his long vigil only slept one-third more time than was regular with him. — William James

If I could order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the Rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one. That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me. His name? Rob Roy. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant.
Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by ... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony. — Mary Karr

Rick Perry was philosophical about (his election losses). He said, 'Last week was Iowa. Yesterday was New Hampshire. ' He said at least it's giving him a chance to learn the names of all the states. — Jay Leno

I have represented farmers in federal court during the Iowa farm crisis. A farmer from Butler County. I don't think Sen. Grassley had that life experience. It's just a simple difference of who we are and where we've come from. — Bruce Braley

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars. — Fred Allen

I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm, so when I come to Washington, I'll know how to cut pork. — Joni Ernst

I'm sort of a Southerner because those are my roots, but my parents are from Iowa. — Geneva Carr

The thing I'm most proud of here at Iowa is putting the ANF on our headgear. — Hayden Fry

The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the people in Iowa. Of course, there was an issue. The issue was, Do you support our policy? But you don't want people to think about that issue. That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? — Noam Chomsky

My parents were divorced and my dad was in the Marines. I lived in California until I was 10 then we moved to Bettendorf, Iowa when I was in the fourth grade. I had an older brother so it made it a little easier to adjust to things. — Robbie Lawler

I'm happy wherever I go, whatever I do. I'm happy in Iowa, I'm happy here in California. — Ashton Kutcher

If there is a thread that unites all of our work, whether it's in Iowa or whether it's in Maryland or whether it's among our young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, I believe that it's the thread of human dignity. — Martin O'Malley

Contrary to slanderous Eastern opinion, much of Iowa is not flat, but rolling hills country with a lot of timber, a handsome and imaginative landscape, crowded with constant small changes of scene and full of little creeks winding with pools where shiners, crappies and catfish hover. — Paul Engle

We have felt for some time that if political candidates or their staff are willing to make the pilgrimage to North Iowa, the least we can do is show hospitality. And it's also a wonderful way to get to know these people who make our political system work. — Kurt Meyer

324This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven--one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. My grandfather's grave turned into the light, and the dew on his weedy little mortality patch was glorious — Marilynne Robinson

I think the only real knowledge I had before I went to Iowa was what I learned from 'Food Inc'. But once I got there and developed these extensive relationships with the farmers, I realized that we're basically made of corn. — Zac Efron

Tell you something," the raven said. "I was flying over the Midwest once." He stopped abruptly, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, and began again. "I was flying over the Midwest. Iowa or Illinois, or some place like that. And I saw this big damn seagull. Right in the middle of Iowa, a seagull. And he was flying around in big, wide circles, real sweeping circles, the way a seagull flies, flapping his wings just enough to keep on the updrafts. Every time he saw water he'd go flying down toward it, yelling, "I found it! I found it!" The poor sonofabitch was looking for the ocean. And every time he saw water, he thought that was the ocean. He didn't know anything about ponds or lakes or anything. All the water he ever saw was the ocean. He thought that was all the water there was. — Peter S. Beagle

And of course, in the case of Barack Obama, had he not won primaries - and particularly the heavily important caucus in Iowa - if the public hadn't shown that they were prepared to vote for a black president, we wouldn't have one today. — Geoffrey Cowan

If I am elected president, keep an eye on the tarmac, because I'll be back, because Iowa in 2017 will not be fly-over country. It will be fly-to country. — Ted Cruz

Is there any other democracy where the voters are as spoiled as they are in the United States? Especially, of course, in certain states, such as Iowa and New Hampshire, where the old joke is literally true about the citizens who say they haven't yet formed an opinion about a candidate because they've only met the fellow a few times. — Michael Kinsley

Jack: For Christ's sake, it wasn't like I was on vacation. I've been in Iowa, in cornfield hell!
Keely: Did you just say you got cornholed in Iowa? — Lorelei James

In Iowa, we take care of people. That's all I think I need to say. — Steve King

You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa. — Gertrude Stein

I'm not competing in Iowa for a reason. — Jon Huntsman Jr.

Hillary Clinton is driving across Iowa in a van. It's to get to know the people she'll never, ever see again in her life. — David Letterman

Is it me or is Bush going everywhere Kerry goes? So far in the past week, President Bush has followed John Kerry to Davenport, Iowa; New Mexico; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; and he follows him to Portland, Oregon. The only place he never followed John Kerry was Vietnam. — Jay Leno

My first district was Northwest Iowa. In 2002, it became North Central Iowa hooking around Des Moines down to the south, clear up to the northeast corner of the state. — Tom Latham

Recruiting at Iowa has never been easy, and I don't think it ever will be. Our biggest challenge has always been to get people to visit our campus. If we can get them here, I feel like we give ourselves a chance because we do have a lot to offer. — Kirk Ferentz

If you want to train and work hard 3 months out of the year, well, then, UNI is a great place to go. If you want to bust your tail 6 months out of the year, you should be very happy at ISU. But if you want to train and develop into a champion 12 months out of the year, then Iowa is the place for you. — Dan Gable

I've been watching politics for 35 or 40 years and you just never know. You can have one person win the Iowa caucus and then the whole picture changes ten minutes later. The same thing can happen again after New Hampshire. I have no idea what's going to happen with our country in the future. — Jackie Mason

Howard Dean came in a disappointing third place. Afterwards Dean said 'Iowa is behind me and now I look forward to screaming at voters in New Hampshire.' — Conan O'Brien

One of the first things I bought when I made 'Roseanne Show' money was a farm in Iowa. — Roseanne Barr

Voters replaced Democratic senators with Republicans in Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, and likely in Alaska, and appear on track to do so in a runoff next month in Louisiana. At the same time, voters kept Republicans in GOP seats in heavily contested races in Georgia, Kansas, and Kentucky. That is at least ten, and as many as a dozen, tough races, without a single Republican seat changing hands. Tuesday's voting was a wave alright - a very anti-Democratic wave. — Byron York

Iowa voters are intelligent enough to make up their minds. — Terry Branstad

(On upcoming racing plans) Right now I am going to go back into training and then I am going to resurface and do the BAA Mile, The Boston Mile, and then I am going to do the USA Championships Mile out in Des Moines, Iowa. Then it is either going to be between The Penn or Drake Relays and then I will go back into training again and start another kind of session. — Leonel Manzano

The early 1990s was a time of great advancements in precooked bacon technology. Pork producers, food labs, and agricultural schools such as Iowa State University began investing substantially in precooked R&D. — David Sax

We've been brainwashed into believing that it's a sin to discriminate. But discrimination doesn't mean racism; it means telling unlike things apart. Iowa grandpas and nine-year-old girls from Ohio are simply not looking to visit 'a painful chastisement upon the Western infidels. — Bill Maher

There a series of Catholic rituals and teachings had offered her young life a coherent universe. By 1946, Savannah had for O'Connor ceded to the university world of Iowa, where new influences, including intellectual joys, brought with them questions and skepticism. — Flannery O'Connor

My teaching began in 1936 at Iowa State College where T. W. Schultz was the department chairman. — George Stigler

I think the paparazzi is a necessary evil ... and if ya don't like it, and ya don't want to do this, go to Iowa and do some community theatre. It's all about self-promotion, and it's not always the fun part of it. — Gail O'Grady

Chris Christie said he will top Donald Trump's Iowa State Fair helicopter entrance by riding in on a pony. As a result, all the ponies in Iowa have gone into hiding. — Conan O'Brien

You know, if they ever gave a Nobel Prize for avoiding work, every year some white guy in Iowa would get a million bucks and a trip to Sweden. — Andrew Smith

He was a playboy type in his late 30's, and a sharp dresser, tonight being no exception. Dave wore a designer sports jacket and chic designer jeans; not at all what you would expect from an FBI agent's undercover expense budget. His wife (or whoever she was), Julia, was a conservative dresser, with more of what you would expect an FBI agent to be wearing. She had mousy brown hair, spoke in nasal tones, and was somewhat frumpy; not much to look at. They went together about as well as Brad Pitt and a den mother from Davenport Iowa. — Kenneth Eade

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad. — Justin Cronin

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. — Ray Bradbury

I started with California, and I did not like it. I flew over to Seattle, and I did not like it much. I felt like Iowa is the place - I like the people and the environment. — Liang Chow

Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. [ ... ] There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred. — Don DeLillo

I was born in Hawaii, but I was raised in Iowa. — Jason Momoa

Someday we'll look back on all of this and we won't even believe we were here," she whispered. "We'll say, 'Do you remember when we used to live in Iowa?'" I smiled, warm, already falling back to sleep. I told her, "We'll say, 'That happened during the Iowa years. — Ann Patchett

When I left Iowa, I definitely never wanted to stand in front of a group of academics again and see if they approved of me. I made up my mind to take my work to the actual reading public. — Daniel Woodrell

CNN recently ran a sort of roundup article on why some conservatives say that Trump talk is fascist. The roundup included this tweet from Iowa Republican radio host, very influential guy in Iowa Republican caucuses, Steve Deace. Quote, "If [Barack] Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump, every conservative in the country would call it what it is - creeping fascism." — Rachel Maddow

Another well-known study, led by Nancy Andreasen, used structured interviews and matched control groups to examine thirty writers at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Eighty percent of the writers met formal criteria for a major mood disorder, compared with thirty percent of controls matched for age, education, and sex. — Joshua Wolf Shenk

There was also a sense that if he [Obama] did not win in Iowa, that it was very unlikely that he would be able to come back and win the Democratic nomination and win the general election. It was sort of an all-or-nothing bet. The stakes were that high. — Josh Earnest

I could be on 52nd and Third in Manhattan up and ask a strange for directions and they will help you, that's a rural heart. Your car breaks down in the middle of Iowa or somewhere, or Tennessee where I'm from, people want to help each other. Given each opportunity, you see how people come together. — Rodney Atkins

I grew up in Swaledale, in Iowa. Its population was 220 when I was growing up, and it's probably 150 now. I lived in town and sometimes worked on the farms outside of town in the summers. — Tom Drury

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't rightly see how somebody who claims to have had -What'd you say? One partner?-can be welled trained."
He had a point. Her brain clicked away. "I was referring to the instructional videotapes my agency has all its new employees watch."
"They train you by watching videos?" His eyes narrowed reminding her of a hunter looking down a gun sight,"Now, ain't that interesting."
She felt a little surge of pleasure as her child lost another few points on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Even a computer couldn't have picked a more perfect match. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class. — Bharati Mukherjee

My mother - who's from Iowa - owns and runs her own day-care centre, while my father's a developer. And my musical influences, I think, came from my father's side of the family. — Keri Hilson

No Republican has ever won South Carolina and Iowa or New Hampshire, as Trump has, without going on to win the nomination. — Chuck Todd

There's less than one percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than four of five percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with. — Joe Biden

Minneapolis doesn't benefit from a proximity to other rich cities and their intermingling of commerce. Instead, it's so far from other major metros that it's a singular magnet for regional talent. "There's basically nothing between us and Seattle, so we've historically had all these smaller cities in Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Montana that are our satellites," Orfield told me. — Anonymous

All of Iowa must be campuses and crops. — Joshua Cohen

Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls - you don't find a sense of community in malls. — Bill Bryson

Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world that may appear quite trivial to others, so be it: Why do more teenagers pick their noses in rural Minnesota than in rural Iowa? What are the patterns of church socials over a twenty-year period in small-town Saskatchewan? What is the correlation between religious affiliation and accident-proneness among elderly Hungarians? — Peter Berger

Speaking of River City in The Music Man & his home town, Mason City, Iowa: I didn't have to make up anything. I simply remembered Mason City as closely as I could. — Meredith Willson

Our family was very fond of the University of Iowa. We thought it was a good place to go. — James Van Allen

Let us tackle the big issues with bold ideas that transform Iowa to accomplish our shared mission to grow Iowa, and realize our shared vision of Iowa as the best place to live, work and raise a family. — Thomas Vilsack

Being from Iowa, I can tell you that Vegas is not normal. — Dave Keuning

Some of my educated Filipino friends were aspiring poets, but their aspirations were all in the direction of the United States. They had no desire to learn from the bardic tradition that continued in the barrios. Their ideal would have been to write something that would get them to Iowa, where they would study creative writing. — James Fenton

Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa. — Joan Didion

I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to. — Bill Bryson

Iowa City is okay as Midwestern cities go, but there's no food, no culture, no ocean. — Elin Hilderbrand

(Researchers at the University of Iowa have for years been studying a woman, known in the literature as S.M., whose amygdala was destroyed by a rare disease - and who cannot, as a consequence, experience fear.) — Scott Stossel

When you live in a small town like Iowa Falls, there's not a lot to do, so we would, as a family, watch a ton of films. — Patrick Whitesell

I once heard a tobacco-chewing hog farmer say that, in Iowa, folks like to spread out their children like dog shit on a dance floor. — Andrew Smith

I got to work for some great administrators at great institutions, and I had an opportunity to coach great players. Iowa is no different. — Steve Alford

About thirty truckers in Brighton, Colorado, refused to move their rigs in protest of the high cost of diesel fuel, fuel shortages, and the fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. Other drivers followed suit in Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, Nebraska, Connecticut, and Delaware. In New Jersey, the governor had to call on the National Guard to remove blockading trucks. The truckers complained that higher fuel prices and lower speed limits were threatening their profits. — Tom Lewis

What is this place? Heaven? <> Ha. <> You're supposed to say, It's Iowa. — Rainbow Rowell

Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like 'a plantation,' adding in a significant tone of voice that 'you know what I mean ... '
She did not repeat this trope, for some reason, when addressing the electors of Iowa or New Hampshire. She's willing to ring the other bell, though, if it suits her. But when an actual African-American challenger comes along, she rather tends to pout and wince at his presumption (or did until recently). — Christopher Hitchens

There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in Western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of me.

It's the beautiful thing about youth.

There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. — Blake Crouch

Where were they from originally? The Seabolts?"
"I don't know, Idaho, Oklahoma, Iowa. One of those red-neck states with vowels on both ends."
"You mean like Alaska? — Dana Stabenow

I want to caucus in Iowa. I'll caucus all over the state. I don't caucus in California. You don't caucus where you live. It doesn't look good. — Pat Paulsen

What is it about Iowa? I'm the shortest guy in the state. — Jason Alexander