Midwesterners Quotes

The pact creating a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns. ~ Nina Easton

Since the nineteen-fifties, rural Florida has marketed itself to Northerners and Midwesterners as an unexplored paradise of citrus and mermaids. ~ Anne Hull

Most of my books are set in the American Midwest, where I have always lived. Midwesterners are lovely, down-to-earth people. The luxury of choosing this region as a setting is the endless supply of seasonal change images that accompany it; in addition to, the wide variety of settings, urban and rural, to choose from. ~ Leigh Michaels

Sometimes I thought of the Peace Corps as a reverse refugee organization, displacing all of us lost Midwesterners, and it was probably the only government entity that taught Americans to abandon key national characteristics. Pride, ambition, impatience, the instinct to control, the desire to accumulate, the missionary impulse - all of it slipped away. ~ Peter Hessler

A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not out loud. The Midwesterner's credo: keep it to yourself. ~ James Hynes

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

Despite the sarcastic remarks of Northerners, who don't know the region (read Easterners, Westerners, North Easterners, North Westerners, Midwesterners), the South of the United States can be so impellingly beautiful that sophisticated creature comforts diminish in importance. ~ Maya Angelou

I'm a Midwesterner! Not being able to have a cheeseburger once in a while would be torture! ~ Jessica Capshaw

I didn't realize how much of a Hoosier or a Midwesterner I was until I moved to New York. It's weird
growing up in Indiana, I wanted to get out, and now I completely romanticize Indiana. It just seems like there's a greater focus on family back there, which I suppose is something that kind of stayed with me. ~ Jim Gaffigan

Despite its reputation, Appalachia - especially northern Alabama and Georgia to southern Ohio - has far lower church attendance than the Midwest, parts of the Mountain West, and much of the space between Michigan and Montana. Oddly enough, we think we attend church more than we actually do. In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South. ~ J.D. Vance

It's tax day and while many Americans are filing their taxes with a groan, taxpayers in the Badger State have reason to cheer. In Wisconsin, we have enacted more than $2 billion in tax cuts, giving our citizens much-needed relief, call us crazy Midwesterners but we think you know how to spend your money better than the government. ~ Marco Rubio

I think there's a down-to-earthness with Midwesterners and with people from the Midlands - which is where my family is from - in Ireland. ~ Aidan Quinn

In this he was like most Midwesterners. Directions are very important to them. They have an innate need to be oriented, even in their anecdotes. Any story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point into a thicket of interior monologue along the lines of "We were staying at a hotel that was eight blocks northeast of the state capital building. Come to think of it, it was northwest. And I think it was probably more like nine blocks. And this woman without any clothes on, naked as the day she was born except for a coonskin cap, came running at us from the southwest... or was it the southeast?" If there are two Midwesterns present and they both witnessed the incident, you can just about write off the anecdote because they will spend the rest of the afternoon arguing points of the compass and will never get back to the original story. You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane. ~ Bill Bryson

I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid. ~ Meghan Daum

We really are 15 countries, and it's remarkable that each of us thinks we represent the real America. The Midwesterner in Kansas, the black American in Durham - both are certain they are the real American. ~ Maya Angelou

These ballot initiatives remind us that America is the land where people are free to dream whatever they want, so long as that dream doesn't make Midwesterners feel icky! ~ Lewis Black

Right now, there are a limited number of customers for Canadian oil. Due to simple geography - and without the pipeline - it's really only cost effective for Canadian oil producers to sell their oil to North American customers, mostly American Midwesterners. ~ Ron Wyden

I've since met other Midwesterners, and I know the drill: They can be witty, bright, and kind, but they're not self-centered, grandiose, or emotional. They can be even-tempered, even during sh@tstorms of winter weather that render their climate unfit for life. They use relative negatives when they-re asked how they're doing, and say it 'could be worse'. They're polite enough to keep their feelings from bleeding over into messy ethnic territories. They hate margarine. ~ Julie Klausner