I like a place where the weather gets “bad” by other people’s standards. I like a place where people are less sure of themselves than they are in sophisticated cities.
Marvin Bell
A Marvin Bell Reader
![President and Mrs. Coolidge, visiting a government farm, were taken around on separate tours. At the chicken pens Mrs. Coolidge paused to inquire of the overseer whether the rooster copulated more than once a day. “Dozens of times,” said the man. “Tell that to the President,” requested Mrs. Coolidge. The President came past the pens and was told about the rooster. “Same hen every time?” he asked. “Oh, no, a different one each time.” Coolidge nodded. “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge,” he said.
Clifton Fadiman
The Little Brown Book of Anecdotes
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
“Death of the Hired Man”
Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn’t original sin. He’s born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it’s a tragedy. A lot of people don’t have the courage to do it.
Helen Hayes
Showcase
My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines.
Bill Bryson
Lost Continent
"What's the difference between a pigeon and an Iowa farmer? A pigeon can still make a deposit on a tractor."
Morris Udall
American English isn’t the British English that is spoken in southern Africa. I walked into a stationery shop [in Iowa City] and said to the man behind the counter: “I would like to buy a rubber, please.”
The man said: “We don’t sell them in ones. We sell them in threes.”
I said: “But I want only one rubber.”
The man became hostile: “But I told you we only sell them in threes.”
I said: “All right, I’ll take three then.”
The man walked to the back of the shop and returned with a small packet of prophylactics that he handed to me. He had such a peculiar look in his eyes that I thought he believed I was a prostitute who had invaded Iowa City. Half fainting with shock I struggled to explain. “I mean the thing you rub mistakes out with.”
“On,” he said. “You mean an eraser.”
Bessie Head
“Some Happy Memories of Iowa”
in Paul Engle, et al., The World Comes to Iowa](Quotes2_files/shapeimage_20.png)
Left Photo montage © 2005 by Roy R. Behrens, from Visual Poems for Gertrude Stein in Cook Book: Gertrude Stein, William Cook and Le Corbusier.
Above Proposed Iowa license plate (not adopted) by Kris Kroemer © 1991.