Midwest Quotes

“The midwest is full of these types of people. The nice enoughs but with a soul made of plastic. Easy to mold, easy to wipe down. The woman's entire music collection is formed from Pottery Barn compilations. Her books shelves are stocked with coffee table crap The Irish in America, Mizzou Football - A History in Pictures, We Remember 911, something dumb with kittens. I knew I needed a pliant friend for my plan, someone I could load up with awful stories about Nick. Someone who would become overly attached to me. Someone who would be easy to manipulate. Who wouldn't think to hard about anything I said because she felt privileged to hear it.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?”
― Stewart O'Nan, Songs for the Missing

“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

“Sometimes, in a tight game with runners on, digging in at short, ready to break with the ball, a peace I'd never felt before would paralyze the diamond. For a moment of eternal stillness I felt as if I were cocked at the very heart of the Midwest.”
― Stuart Dybek, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods: Stories

“For me, a plain Middle Westerner, there is no middle way. I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world—and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing.”
― Marguerite Young

“Rosie and Mary had taken only a 10 percentage of this privilege - they were three minutes late leaving their room and took the second bus that went past rather than the first just so they could feel themselves standing at a bus stop in Manhattan, New York, surrounded by people who were short, dark and voluble rather than tall, blond and silent. The fatal part was the bus they got on. They, of course stood, because they had been taught to do so, out of respect to everyone else in the whole world - they were from the Midwest and deference was their habit and their training.

......."Did you see that?"

"What?" replied Mary

"That woman."

"God, she was rude," said Mary.

And from that statement Rosalind knew that Mary would live the rest of her life in the Midwest, which she did.”
― Jane Smiley

“It's the Cuyahoga River that puts the cleave in Cleveland, separating East from Midwest, integration from segregation, a place that sees itself as America's westernmost Eastern city from a place that sees itself as the easternmost midwestern city. The rest of the country sees it as neither, though it must be said that the rest of the country is perversely wont to misunderstand Cleveland.”
― Mark Winegardner

“The wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. It's the difference between this wind and its big-city cousins: the full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice. Where immigrant farmers planted windbreaks a hundred and fifty years ago. it keens in protest; where the young corn shoots up, it whispers as it passes, crossing field after field in its own time, following eastward trends but in no hurry to find open water. You can't usually see it in paintings, but it's an important part of the scenery.”
― John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

“[...] grew up here, in what show business people, which now includes our best-known politicians and so-called journalists, often call 'flyover country.' We are somewhere between television cameras in Washington DC, and New York, and Los Angeles. Please join me in saying to the undersides of their airplanes, 'Go to hell.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“Closing his eyes, he held her tightly and sifted place in a general southerly direction, pushing to the farthest limits his diminished power could carry him. The moment he rematerialized, he instantly sifted again, arms locked around her.
Railroad track. Sift. Grocery store. Keep moving. Roof of a house. Sift. Cornfield. Sift. Cornfield. Sift. Cornfield. Sift. Cornfield. Bloody Midwest. Sift.”
― Karen Marie Moning

“If you believe that life should be full of adventure , then you have to willing to let your kids have them, too.”
― Kathleen Flinn, Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good: A Memoir of Food and Love from an American Midwest Family

“It looks a bit like the inside of a cave that has been turned inside out and warmed by the sun.”
― Stefanie Payne, A Year in the National Parks: The Greatest American Road Trip

“He missed the Midwest... Northern California was impractically beautiful. Everywhere you looked there were trees and streams, waterfalls, mountains, the ocean... There was nowhere to look just to look, just to think.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Attachments

“A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you’re from, especially if you’re from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.”
― Leah Stewart, The History of Us

“Almost on crossing the Ohio line it seemed to me that people were more open and more outgoing. The waitress in a roadside stand said good morning before I had a chance to, discussed breakfast as though she liked the idea, spoke with enthusiasm about the weather, sometimes even offered some information about herself without my delving. Strangers talked freely to one another without caution. I had forgotten how rich and beautiful is the countryside - the deep topsoil, the wealth of great trees, the lake country of Michigan handsome as a well-made woman, and dressed and jeweled. It seemed to me that the earth was generous and outgoing here in the heartland, and perhaps the people took a cue from it.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“There was something about the Midwest in her that Wallingford loved.”
― John Irving, The Fourth Hand

“All I know is that the fear I have been battling all night is breaking down the door of my ignorance. As my feet slam down I feel not the hard, wet asphalt but the soft Persian rug that led to the staircase in my father’s home. In the glow of lightning the dancing trees are illuminated but I see my mother in the glow of candlelight, spinning, twirling, her hair fanned out
behind her. It is falling over me, saturating my thoughts, and I cannot. I cannot let it in.”
― Gwenn Wright, The BlueStocking Girl

“With all this snow, with the sun not there, with the cold and dreariness, this place doesn't look like my America, doesn't even look real. It's like we are in a terrible story, like we're in the crazy parts of the Bible, there where God is busy punishing people for their sins and is making them miserable with all the weather. The sky, for example, has stayed white all this time I have been here, which tells you that something is not right. Even the stones know that a sky is supposed to be blue, like our sky back home, which is blue, so blue you can spray Clorox on it and wipe it with a paper towel and it wouldn't even come off.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

“She had lived in eight different countries growing up and had visited dozens of others. To most people, this sounded cool, and in some ways, Ayers knows, it was cool, or parts of it were. But since humans are inclined to want what they don't have, she longed to live in America, preferably the solid, unchanging, undramatic Midwest, and attend a real high school, the kind shown in movies, complete with a football team, cheerleaders, pep rallies, chemistry labs, summer reading lists, hall passes, proms, detentions, assemblies, fund-raisers, lockers, Spanish clubs, marching bands, and the dismissal bell.”
― Elin Hilderbrand, Winter in Paradise

“Beyond the borders of the land that was his lay the wilderness that was its own. The upthrust stone, the shoulders of the Bighorns, reddish gray where they stood near to the homestead and blue where they stood far—bluer, dissipating veils of blue lost against an indistinct horizon. The pale gold of autumn grass like the rough hide of an animal, wind-riffled down the mountain’s flank. The low trough where the river ran, a score mark in wet clay—dark, shadow-and-green, redolent of moving water, of soil that never went dry. And the infinite sweep of the prairie, yellow shaded with folds of violet until, a hundred miles away or more, the whole plain was swallowed by color and consumed, taken up by the lower edge of a sagging purple sky.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“I rake a mangle of stick
and leaf and divots of moss. I am industrious,
that Midwest virtue.”
― Jan Worth

“Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.”
― Terry Pratchett

“I never blindly roamed with a team just for the sake of social labeling or fitting in. I was never part of a particular group, scene or tribe. I was friends with everybody. My best friend in high school was prom queen, yet I was voted the biggest nonconformist of my senior class. I've lived all over the country, but my roots, views and attitude are very Midwestern. I was born in the Heartland, where there exists a true melting pot of religions, classes and cultures.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“A much larger covey hails from the stalwart states that begin with the letter I--like Iowa and Indiana and Illinois. Bred with just the right amount of fresh air, roughhousing, and ignorance, these primitive blondes set out from the cornfields looking like starlight with limbs.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“He hated winter. The same gray sky lay on the ground, day after day, gray as industrial smoke, and in the sky the ground floated like a street that's been salted, and his closets were cold, holes wore through his pockets, and he was lonely, indoors and out, with a loneliness like the loneliness of overshoes or someone else's cough.”
― William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories

“That's the thing about Ohio - winter drags on so long that once mid-March hits, if it's above forty degrees everyone's outside wearing shorts and t-shirts and dining on patios.”
― Kerry Winfrey, Not Like the Movies

“You're right. I forgot that barns were heated."
Hannah didn't bother to correct her sister. Strictly speaking, Andrea was right, barns were heated. They were kept warm by herding in all the cattle, keeping them together in a closed space and utilizing their body heat. When it came to barns in the winter BTUs stood for Bunched Together Until Summer.”
― Joanne Fluke, Cherry Cheesecake Murder

“I was certain it would indeed be charming, but the Upper Midwest made me moody; people made me feel like I was being asked to speak a language I'd never learned and in which I was constantly misunderstood.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“Shake Shack- The now multinational, publicly traded fast-food chain was inspired by the roadside burger stands from Danny's youth in the Midwest and serves burgers, dogs, and concretes- frozen custard blended with mix-ins, including Mast Brothers chocolate and Four & Twenty Blackbirds pie, depending on the location.
Blue Smoke- Another nod to Danny's upbringing in the Midwest, this Murray Hill barbecue joint features all manner of pit from chargrilled oysters to fried chicken to seven-pepper brisket, along with a jazz club in the basement.
Maialino- This warm and rustic Roman-style trattoria with its garganelli and braised rabbit and suckling pig with rosemary potatoes is the antidote to the fancy-pants Gramercy Park Hotel, in which it resides.
Untitled- When the Whitney Museum moved from the Upper East Side to the Meatpacking District, the in-house coffee shop was reincarnated as a fine dining restaurant, with none other than Chef Michael Anthony running the kitchen, serving the likes of duck liver paté, parsnip and potato chowder, and a triple chocolate chunk cookie served with a shot of milk.
Union Square Café- As of late 2016, this New York classic has a new home on Park Avenue South. But it has the same style, soul, and classic menu- Anson Mills polenta, ricotta gnocchi, New York strip steak- as it first did when Danny opened the restaurant back in 1985.
The Modern- Overlooking the Miró, Matisse, and Picasso sculptures in MoMA's Sculpture Garden, the dishes here are appropriately refined and artistic. Think cauliflower roasted in crab butter, sautéed foie gras, and crispy Long Island duck.”
― Amy Thomas, Brooklyn in Love: A Delicious Memoir of Food, Family, and Finding Yourself

“Just because my ancestor built a flipping castle in a place like Wisconsin, this is the kind of attention we get?"
"It's not the only castle in the Midwest," Cleo offered, hoping to diffuse the situation.
They stood around Stasia's car, no one getting in. Dave leaned against the trunk of his own vehicle parked ahead of Stasia's.
"No. It's not," Stasia agreed. "There's one in Ohio. Built by German immigrants.”
― Jaime Jo Wright, The Vanishing at Castle Moreau