A Quote by Bill Bryson

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

Bill Bryson

Quote Topics

American Built Circles City Des Moines Just Like Like You Malls Outward Typical Your

Quote Author

Bill Bryson
American - Writer
Born: December 8, 1951

Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls - you don't find a sense of community in malls.

Bill Bryson

Hardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. Outside town there is a big sign that says, WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE. There isn't really. I just made that up. But the place does get a grip on you.

Bill Bryson

I am from Des Moines, Iowa - not even the city but out in the country. I don't have a lot of trappings, I think, in my personality. I'm just a simple person with a silly bone.

Cloris Leachman

A typical National World Weekly would tell the world how Jesus' face was seen on a Big Mac bun bought by someone from Des Moines, with an artist's impression of the bun; how Elvis Presley was recently sighted working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines; how listening to Elvis records cured a Des Moines housewife's cancer; how the spate of werewolves infesting the Midwest are the offspring of noble pioneer women raped by Bigfoot; and that Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world. Remarkably, one of these stories is indeed true.

Neil Gaiman

The first city I ever came to in the states was Des Moines. I was 12 and was in a boys' choir.

St. Lucia

I come from regional, small-city drag, where if you won Miss Des Moines, Iowa, and you did something bad, or you were being a role model, your crown was taken away.

Sharon Needles

Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines.

Bill Bryson

Fads get hot in California. A good idea can come from Des Moines, but it's not going to be anything there. Then it'll hit Venice Beach or Westwood and go all around the country, back to Des Moines.

Ken Hakuta

Avery fine city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one city together? In a word,'tis the cleanest and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted.

Daniel Defoe

At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn't look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that's completely typical of Seattle. You can't quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?

Jonathan Raban

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.

Bill Bryson

The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate. Many of us move from one place to the other. But even those who don't move, and you stay in the same city, if you were born in Manhattan 70 years ago, you're born in Des Moines 70 years ago, you've lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable.

Mohsin Hamid

Texas Gov. Rick Perry referred to the Mexican city of Juarez as the most dangerous city in America. In his defense, he probably just thought it was an American city because there were so many Mexicans there.

Jay Leno

I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—they were coming home from high school—but I had no time for thoughts like that…So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.

Jack Kerouac

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.