Top 122 Midwest Quotes

There are so many stories from the Midwest that should be told. L.A. tells one story, and it’s often about itself.

We know enough to reject the stereotype that people in the Midwest do not care about their brothers and sisters.

Coming from the Midwest, I didn’t know about stand-up as an art. I just thought stand-up comedians were old men in suits talking about their wives.

Writers who aren’t from rural states in the Midwest or the West often treat such people as if they were the Waltons or the Beverly Hillbillies.

Starting at 11, I was a movie-theater popcorn girl, a babysitter, a sales clerk – in the Midwest, they start them early!

Because I was from the Midwest and untrained, I was completely open and ready to try anything. Many of my classmates were cynical and jaded; some already had conservatory training, and they were there simply to get that Yale stamp of approval, which they saw as a career stepping-stone.

I don’t think any other holiday embraces the food of the Midwest quite like Thanksgiving. There’s roasted meat and mashed potatoes. But being here is also about heritage. Cleveland is really a giant melting pot – not only is my family a melting pot, but so is the city.

I grew up in Texas, and I think anybody who grows up in the Midwest or in the South, it’s just a different way of life.

Midwest kids got to summer camp. There is something very special about being away from your parents for the first time, sleeping under the stars, hiking and canoeing.

Midwest elections have consequences.

The Midwest isn’t somewhere you mix with those from the performing arts. But my mum and dad would go off to Chicago every so often to see shows. They would bring back the albums and the movies, those little eight metres, and we would all watch. I think that was when I fell in love with acting.

I’ve tried and failed a lot. But I’ve also tried to be really clear about my brand. It is who I am. I’m a mum, I’m a wife, I’m 44 and from the Midwest.

You can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can’t take the Midwest out of the boy.

I meet a lot of young people in the Midwest, and I saw what a difference a show like In the Life can make to their lives in some of these small towns where, you know, there are probably two gay people in the whole damn town.

I just think – the Midwest, if you grow up there, you’re deathly afraid of putting on airs. Any time a Midwesterner criticizes someone, it’s usually involving some form of being too big for your britches.

I was raised Catholic in the Midwest, so I can’t enjoy anything.

Classical pianist Awadagin Pratt. I first heard this eccentric and introverted performer when I was living in the Midwest. He was playing Brahms ballades – haunting.

Foreign policy is something Americans care about when the economy is good, and when it isn’t, they hardly notice it. It’s hard to worry about what happens in the Mideast when you don’t have a job in the Midwest.

After the success of ‘August,’ there were people saying I should change my life. And maybe I should have bought a yacht and traveled the world instead of returning to Steppenwolf to act in and write plays. But I’m from the Midwest, and that’s what we do: We go back to work.

It is critical to develop a biofuel industry powered by feedstocks produced in every corner of the country, in addition to the Midwest. That is why USDA has established five regional research centers working on science necessary to ensure profitable biofuels can be produced from a diverse range of feedstocks.

I’ve completely embraced life in Florida after growing up in the Midwest. This is home for me.

I stand for the Midwest. That’s why the album’s titled ‘M.O.,’ ’cause I’m still holding it down like that. My friends and family all call me Mo, so it’s kind of like really representing where I’m from and me at the same time.

I grew up in the Midwest and had a lot of exposure to big religion. I went to church every Sunday – my mother even sang in the choir – and most families I knew where practicing Christians.

She comes from the Midwest. She had me at a very young age and raised me on her own. She’s a very hard worker.

I’m a conservative dude from the Midwest. I went crazy out here in LA.

I never wanted to return to Hollywood because Hollywood people and the fakeness – very artificial and not dear to my heart. After I lived in the Midwest, and I learned what sincere, real people were all about, I never wanted to go back.

In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child.

‘The Bill Engvall Show’ is a comedy about a middle-class family in the Midwest. It’s a great family show to watch if you want to laugh and unwind.

I was never that kid who grew up in New York and was always at the arthouse watching important films. I was the kid who grew up in the Midwest where there weren’t any art films, and I watched TV. And that was really the medium that affected me and that I fell in love with.

I’m from the Midwest, and I loved my family. I had a very good time as a child, but I was also – I have a theory about Jews growing up in the Midwest, that there is an ultimately sort of wonderful avoidance of a lot of things, and a great acceptance of whatever is happening.

Today, President Obama is making smart investments in clean energy – wind, solar, biofuels – as part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy that supports thousands of jobs, not in the Middle East, but in the Midwest.

I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and have spent a lot of time in the Midwest.

When I turned about 14, I developed a friendship with this guy whose mom was the secretary to Ernest Angley, the faith healer, who’s very popular in the Midwest. He had a television show, and he was sort of like Liberace mixed with Jerry Falwell – very glitzy, very high-tech.

I grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in South Dakota.

Growing up in the Midwest, Boston, and Alabama, I didn’t know any Puerto Ricans… at least, I didn’t know if I knew any Puerto Ricans. The only Puerto Rican that I had ever even heard of was Juan Epstein, one of the students from the classic 1970s sitcom ‘Welcome Back, Kotter.’

There is a bedrock decency to people in the Midwest. They are thoughtful and ready to help you if something needs to be done.

I think Chicago people are very special people, and the Midwest’s confluence of East Coast-meets-Midwest sensibilities had to, on a formative level, inform me as an artist and an actor. In that sense, it had to have helped me.

I grew up in the Midwest; you don’t know any screenwriters. It didn’t seem like a realistic career possibility.

We focus sometimes too much on the minimum wage, and we should be talking about living wages and middle class wages and pensions and benefits and the kind of thing that people in the industrial Midwest talk about all the time.

I like healthful foods, but I’m from the Midwest, so I like food that’s been around longer.

I love New York, and I’m drawn to a certain intensity of life, but I’ve just never felt like I want to escape from the Midwest. A writer lives a great deal in his own head, and so one intuitively finds places where your head is more clear. New York for me is one of those places.

Coming from where I came from, the Midwest, in the era I was born, the ’30s, movies were glorious fun – Bette Davis dying or whatever. But whatever they were, they were not serious.

When you look at the number of nuclear power plants in China and India, we can’t afford not to pursue similar alternative energy sources. If we do not, it would do immense harm to the manufacturing industry in the Midwest.

I spent a few years cutting my teeth in the Midwest; I worked for Ring of Honor, then I went down to Florida and relearned everything there.

The midwest is great because it hasn’t been entirely claimed. There’s more room to write about it; it’s harder to write about New York, because even if you’ve never been there, you think you know what it’s like. To do it in any sort of fresh way is trickier.

It’s the friends that make you survive this flat place called the Midwest.

Growing up in the Midwest, people don’t drive Porsches and Ferraris. They drive Fords and Chevys. And so even if you have the opportunity to buy a more expensive car, it doesn’t occur to you because it’s not what you relate to.

I’m from the Midwest.

Like many of us in Arizona, I wasn’t born here – I’m a product of the Midwest and the working class.

I’m from the Midwest, so I always assumed, ‘Well, I have to think badly of myself, because that’s being humble.’

The Midwest is a musical melting pot and the source and birthplace of several musical genres.

I liked dark, urban stories like ‘Peter Gunn,’ which was a detective series on network TV when I was a little boy. I grew up in a farmtown in the Midwest where not much exciting happened. I liked the idea of lives lived at night and the shadowy characters who lived in that demi-monde.

I love the Midwest accent.

I was born in Chicago, then I spent most of my youth in Joliet, Illinois which is about thirty minutes south, and I went to a military academy for high school in Wisconsin. Then I went to college, on a basketball scholarship to a small school in Iowa, so I’m like Mr. Midwest.

I’m from the Midwest. We like to know who our neighbors are.

I was born and raised in the Midwest, where people were taught that decency and integrity and community were all important values. We were democrats with a little ‘d.’

I see how the Midwest distrusts the East Coast. The Midwest sees itself as morally superior. The Coast sees itself as intellectually superior. And the two are actually the same thing.

It’s a character I’ve created. Actually, that’s pretty much the opposite of me, off a farm in the Midwest.

I grew up in the Midwest. I understand a sense of the small-town mentality, small-town social politics.

I grew up in the Midwest, so we really didn’t have much hockey going on.

Friends in the Midwest often ask me what it’s like to raise a family in Los Angeles. I say it’s just like where they are, but warmer and with more traffic. I also tell them people here seem a bit more tolerant of those who are different.

There are a lot of regulations that are really just crushing jobs. Look at the coal miners in the Rust Belt that are getting out of work. Look at the – look at the loggers and the timber workers and the paper mills in the West Coast. Look at the ranchers or farmers in the Midwest with regulations.

New York was scary, coming from the Midwest. At first, I thought I’d come in all cocky, like, ‘I’m gonna bring this town to its knees!’ After about a month, I was like, ‘I wanna go home.’

I go back to a very specific aspect of the Midwest – small towns surrounded by farmland. They make a good stage for what I like to write about, i.e., roads and houses, bridges and rivers and weather and woods, and people to whom strange or interesting things happen, causing problems they must overcome.

I like Target. I like the ones in the Midwest, personally. We don’t really have those in England yet.

Being from the Midwest, everyone knows I take pride in representing the U.S. and to have my own racket and bag is really nice.

A lot of the people of the Midwest came from the Northeast. We’re of the same stock. Yet something must have happened when we crossed the Ohio River Valley because I have sensed that there’s more of an openness and flexibility of spirit out West.

Chicago – it’s the Midwest, and the people are not as tough or not as edgy as they are in New York.

Your belief system tends to be a function of how you were raised. Being raised in the Midwest and in a relatively conservative household, my views were shaped by my upbringing, by my Christian faith.

Although he moved away from the Midwest for good at the age of thirteen, Ray Bradbury is a prairie writer. The prairie is in his voice, and it is his moral compass. It is his years spent in Waukegan, Illinois – later rechristened by Ray as ‘Green Town’ in many books and stories – that forever shaped him.

I’m a weensy-government conservative from the Midwest, Christian, mother of two, homeschooler, and my hobby, profession, and passion is news.

I think a lot of gay kids in the midwest or in places not in New York have to overachieve in order to sort of get through the fear of what they’re going through.

I grew up in the Midwest, so I have sort of an honorable moral code. But I moved to a city and joined a sort of fast crowd. A lot of people who grew up in the city sort of aren’t aware of manners and other ways of life and ‘common decency.’

I wear clothes that most people in the Midwest would probably deem inappropriate at my age. And I rock a bikini all summer long. I know that it’s not normal, but I just don’t care. I live once.

The people in the Upper Midwest were the same kind of people I grew up around in Idaho.

I’ve heard stories about authors filled with this kind of Lotto-winner hubris. I’m a Dutch boy from the Midwest. We don’t have hubris.

I was fat because I lived in the Midwest in the 1970s, and everyone was a little fat then and only getting fatter.

As an undergraduate, I had an opportunity to go on a number of archeological digs. So I had experience excavating, digging up remains of ancient Indian villages in the Midwest and in the Southwest.

I was born in the Midwest, where ‘salad’ was cherry Jell-O with bananas in it. Now children are more aware of healthy foods.

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early ’60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.

When you hit the Midwest… it’s just some passion – I don’t know if it’s in the water or what it is – but it’s just embedded in these kids.

My priorities are to continue to fight for manufacturing in my state and for jobs and health care and deal with lead issues in my beloved city of Cleveland, where I live, and every other city in the industrial Midwest.

There are parts of the country in America, in the Midwest, where wind is a big resource, and we should absolutely use it. But to try and apply it nationally doesn’t make sense. There are technologies that will work that are appropriate to certain regions.

When I meet gay fans out and about, they’re so great to talk to – and I’m big on hugging, because I’m from the Midwest. They’re just so energetic and loving. I’m proud to have those fans, and their support means a lot to me. I don’t want just girls coming to my movies; I want guys to come, too!

My wife and I grew up in the Northeast but my daughters are sort of small-town girls, from the Midwest.

They started saying stuff like ‘Should we cut the movie? Is it too this, too that?’ It got drastic. It got heated. I said, ‘Wait a minute, folks. I didn’t make ‘Smokey’ for big-city audiences. I made it for the South, the Midwest and Northwest. Those are my people.’

I just want to be a nice girl from the Midwest – I don’t want to have to act like a heavy to be taken seriously, and I resent that I have to be so pushy and political sometimes just to do my job.

Growing up, all I did was write about the fact that I’m from where I’m from. I was a big champion of where I was from and Wisconsin in general, and the Midwest.

I grew up in the Midwest, quite far from any ocean or any beach, a million miles. I think for kids who grew up where I did, the idea of California, surfing and beach life was so exotic and glamorous.

Every little pocket of Los Angeles County is almost like its own state. It has its own way of being and own way of feeling, and parts of it feel like the Midwest, and parts of it feel like the East Coast. It’s a rich tapestry.

I had accidentally gotten a laugh on a line in a play I was in during high school. I got hooked, but I had no idea I would ever be able to support myself by acting. I knew no one in the business. I was from the Midwest. No one within a radius of a thousand miles was doing anything like that.

I’m proud to come from the Midwest and that’s where I’m comfortable at.

Even though I’m from the Midwest, the majority of my life has been spent on the coasts where being gay wasn’t really much of a conversation.

People in the Midwest, there’s a lot of regional pride and a lot more, like, fake positivity – ‘That’s great – you’re awesome!’

I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.

My parents are from the Midwest. They’re from Evanston, Illinois. They moved out to Los Angeles right before I was born.

It took me coming to the Midwest to realize I was the jerk. People are so nice here. They’re so grounded.

The thing about Chicago is that it really isn’t like any other place. The architecture and the layout of the city are the best. I’m from the Midwest, and consider myself a Midwesterner. I feel most at home there. I love California. I have great friends in California. I just have always considered Illinois to be home.

The reality is the cap-and-trade legislation offered by the Democrats amounts to an economic declaration of war on the Midwest by liberals on Capitol Hill.

I was miserable in West Side Story. They really miscast me. I came from the Midwest; what they really needed was a guy that was street smart. The first time I saw the movie, I had to walk out. I looked like the biggest fruit that ever walked on to film. My character was so weak.

Books set in Brooklyn and L.A. are often about people who are rootless, who want to go somewhere else. In the Midwest, though, the stories are about people who want to stay where they are – who like where they are.

The most interesting letters I received about ‘The Name of the Rose’ were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn’t understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.

Some readers took ‘Heaven’s My Destination’ as a satire on Christianity and the Midwest, but today it reads like a loving comedy.

It’s so easy to print in the Midwest. You’re saving months in shipping and customs, so we have started printing a number of books there.

I don’t live in Hollywood. I don’t have celebrities as friends. I like them, but I don’t pal around with them. I just live in the Midwest, a real normal world.

Chicago still remains a Mecca of the Midwest – people from both coasts are kind of amazed how good life is in Chicago and what a good culture we’ve got. You can have a pretty wonderful artistic life and never leave Chicago.

I come from the Midwest, from the suburbs – growing up hanging out at the mall and looking at the corn fields across the street. I kind of was embarrassed by it for a long time. Then I decided, ‘Hey, if everyone else can embrace their homeland and where they’re from, I can do the same!’

I was made fun of in the Midwest – I was the only Asian in my graduating class of 200. Fortunately, I found my niche, and it was fine. But I wanted to be so white, you wouldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘I want to be white; I don’t want to be this anymore.’ But now I embrace it.

I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening – the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us – seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent.

Wrestling in the Midwest is always such a blast, and a favorite place of mine.

People always want you to look pretty. I would like to live in the Midwest in a small town and never put makeup on. But they won’t let you do that. Once I went through a period when I did do that, wore no makeup, wore my hair any which way, and people looked at me like I was a bum.

I had been blogging for a few years when Jonah Straus, my now-literary agent, reached out to see if I’d consider writing a cookbook. At the time, I didn’t feel ready; I was still getting adjusted to life in the upper Midwest, and I was still finding my recipe voice.

Being in the Midwest, you get the best of all worlds and add your own flavor to it.

I grew up in small towns in Iowa and the Midwest.

The next thing I am doing is moving back home to Minnesota and getting involved in politics. I’m looking at a run for Senate in 2008, but in the meantime I am focused on knitting together the progressive network in the upper Midwest.

Most of the tech CEOs I know used to think that moving to the Midwest or the South was beneath us, a good tactic for the Boeings of the world who don’t need the kind of rare skills we depend on, who have to grub for profits when we reach for growth. But if Amazon can’t afford to keep growing in Seattle, who can?

I left the Midwest when I was twelve years old, and I haven’t lived in a small town since.

Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies.

I don’t mean to make a generalization, but I do at the same time, from what I know about people from the Midwest, it seems like their families would talk about money openly in front of them when they were kids. They’d say stuff like, ‘We’re broke! We’re gonna lose the house!’

I was a college dropout, hitchhiking across the Midwest. That was part of the old, adventurous spirit.

I wanted to make it in New York. I thought if I went out to the Midwest, I’d be burying myself. But I was wrong.

Growing up in a small town, in the Midwest, and Catholic – those are sort of three layers of repression.