Iowa Quotes

“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”
― Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

“They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.”
― Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

“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

“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, Grasshopper Jungle

“During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and 'experience' to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much from the position adopted by the Bush administration as she emphasized the stand taken, by both her husband and Al Gore, when they were in office, to the effect that another and final confrontation with the Baathist regime was more or less inevitable. Now, it does not especially matter whether you agree or agreed with her about this (as I, for once, do and did). What does matter is that she has since altered her position and attempted, with her husband’s help, to make people forget that she ever held it. And this, on a grave matter of national honor and security, merely to influence her short-term standing in the Iowa caucuses. Surely that on its own should be sufficient to disqualify her from consideration?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Yet isn't it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn't some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her 'greatness' (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“History is full of decapitations, and Iowa is no exception.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“Following his wonderful introduction to the joys of womanhood, Waldo found a perverse pleasure in leaving his after-sex cigarette butt glowing on the lawn of the executive mansion. Despite Jeanne's repeated assurances that it wouldn't actually be visible to any nineteenth century passers-by, Waldo preferred to picture his discarded cigarette butt being the center of much scrutiny, with puzzled Civil War-era Washingtonians reacting to it in the same way Brazilian farmers would react to U.F.O.'s a century later.”
― Donald Jeffries, The Unreals

“Morgens schlief Dewey neben einer Kiste voller Karteikarten und hatte nur eine Pfote hineingestellt. Vielleicht hatte es Stunden gedauert, bis er widerwillig eingesehen hatte,dass mehr von ihm keinen Platz darin fand.”
― Vicki Myron

“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, Grasshopper Jungle

“Try this." O'Grady smiled. "It's the only thing we drink. It'll warm your insides."
"What is it?" Asked the ever cautious Waldo.
"We call it the Forest Flaming Special. Go ahead-drink up."
"Well, okay...." Waldo lifted the cup and nearly dropped it when saw his name printed clearly on the side.
"We've been expecting you." Explained Fred, beginning to laugh.”
― Donald Jeffries, The Unreals

“During the summer of 2001, [FAIR] played a supportive role in advising local activists in Iowa who were mobilizing against Governor Tom Vilsack's Model Cities program to create "immigration enterprise zones" to address the state's chronic labor shortages.”
― Pratheepan Gulasekaram, The New Immigration Federalism

“I have fought through all the elements to get to where I am now. I've become a shell of what I used to be, and now there's more nature in me than man. Ghosts have filled the hollows of my memory, leaving behind the raging wind in the plane where there once had been so much promise.”
― bellatuscana, Discovering Time

“I woke up finding the world I had known to be gone. Instead, the sky was glowing. I stood up. Nothing had happened to the child, I was as perfectly pregnant as before. The sky seemed to be full of glittering objects floating around, that on further inspection were glowing specs. There were no trees, no buffalo, just endless hills that seem to go on and on.”
― bellatuscana, Discovering Time