Top 167 Des Moines Quotes & Sayings

Explore popular Des Moines quotes.
Last updated on April 21, 2025.
The opposite of what is noised about concerning men and things is often the truth. [Fr., Le contraire des bruits qui courent des affaires ou des personnes est souvent la verite.]
Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
I'm from the US of A. Born in Des Moines, raised in the New York suburbs. — © Stephen Collins
I'm from the US of A. Born in Des Moines, raised in the New York suburbs.
I catch Filter in Des Moines doing their soundcheck at a small club. After tearing through a few songs, they spend nearly an hour meeting with fans as part of a radio station meet-and-greet.
There are a bunch of places to stay in Des Moines, but I'd suggest finding a place on the west side of town. It's a great urban area that has a lot to offer tourists.
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.
It's hard to pass up a pole vault opportunity here in Des Moines. The crowd was so great when I was at the mall and I was pumped up and I thought technically I was on and I figured where else to open up my outdoor season than here.
A high percentage of each of my books has been written in Des Moines.
I think that the Internet is going to effect the most profound change on the entertainment industries combined. And we're all gonna be tuning into the most popular Internet show in the world, which will be coming from some place in Des Moines. We're all gonna lose our jobs. We're all gonna be on the Internet trying to find an audience.
When I was studying at the Iowa Writers School, I read a sports writer, Ron Maly, from the Des Moines Register. He was a good sports writer. I became real interested in the contrast between Lute Olson, who was the coach of Iowa at the time, and Ron Maly.
Secret Service agents detained an Iowa man with a gun who happened to be walking in a Des Moines park where President Bush was jogging. Were they out of their minds? White guys with guns put Bush in the White House.
I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.
I must admit, even my fans everywhere I go in the world - just this week I was in London and Glasgow and the week before I was in Des Moines - my fans all look the same in all those cities - they look great!
History is but the record of crimes and misfortunes. L'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs
In a small town, everyone works together and does life together, and because of that everyone takes care of each other. That's Iowa. Whether it's Des Moines or Sioux Center, Decorah or Davenport, Iowans exhibit those small-town values. They work hard, but not so much for themselves. They're ambitious, but not at the expense of others.
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.
Those that have received care here in Des Moines at the VA center or the VA hospital here have said that they do receive good care. However, it's getting into the system - the wait periods. We have to do something about that. The care here has been good. We're not seeing that in other states.
What the Des Moines Register said - you know, there were coin - I think there were half a dozen coin flips - a fairly chaotic type situation. At the end of the day, no matter how it's recounted, it will break roughly even. I love and respect the caucus process in Iowa. See, and I don't have to say it, because they voted already.
(On upcoming racing plans) Right now I am going to go back into training and then I am going to resurface and do the BAA Mile, The Boston Mile, and then I am going to do the USA Championships Mile out in Des Moines, Iowa. Then it is either going to be between The Penn or Drake Relays and then I will go back into training again and start another kind of session.
If you want to be a comedian, go out. Do a week in Des Moines, Iowa. Try to make those people laugh. — © Nick Swardson
If you want to be a comedian, go out. Do a week in Des Moines, Iowa. Try to make those people laugh.
One cannot rule out a blizzard in Minnesota after Labor Day, and so when I travel for Thanksgiving or any time in the fall, I am careful to fly into Des Moines instead of Minneapolis and then drive the 200 miles north to my hometown.
Love is the history of a woman's life; it is an episode in man's. [Fr., L'amour est l'histoire de la vie des femmes; c'est un episode dans celle des hommes.]
I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.
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.
I still live in Des Moines.
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.
In the end, Obama won, stealing the change message from John Edwards and beating back Hillary Clinton's focus on experience. And the race turned on a remarkable speech Obama gave on the night of Nov. 10, 2007, in Des Moines.
So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.
We don't have a constant PR person or anything. That's why people say. 'Oh, you're still together?' Yeah. I'm in Des Moines with the band, not because I'm sightseeing.
I'm willing to go through a full body scan or anything else you need to. What I am offended by is the absolute unwillingness of Obama's administration. Callista and I did a movie called "America at Risk: The War with No Name," where we outlined - who are the people who've been terrorists in the last three or four years? They're all males. They're all young. They're all fairly identifiable in other ways. So we're going to a point - we're going to have a full body scan of an 83-year-old nun from Des Moines because we don't want to be honest about who our enemies are?
Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington -- it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston. ...This is your victory.
Whenever I'm in Des Moines, I always make a trip to Manhattan Deli for a sandwich. I spent a lot of time there when I was going to college at Drake, so it's usually my one 'go-to' food stop when I'm in town.
Look, you know i don't wanna come on ungrateful, but that warren report, you know as well as me, just didn't make it. You know, like they might as well have asked some banana salesman from des moines, who was up in toronto on the big day, if he saw anyone around looking suspicious/.
I-just-got-off-the-bus-and-I'm-really-excited-and-ambitious-and-I-took-an-acting-class-in-Des-Moines-and-I-know-I-really-need-an-agent-and-I-want-one-NOW
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.
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.
I've still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, 'You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth.'
My interest in chemistry was started by reading Robert Kennedy Duncan's popular books while a high school student in Des Moines, Iowa, so that after some delay when it was possible for me to go to college I had definitely decided to specialize in chemistry.
Combien de gens se font abstraits pour para?tre profonds! La plupart des termes abstraits sont des ombres qui cachent des vides. How many people become abstract in order to appear profound! Most abstract terms are shadows that conceal a void.
Consider that the overwhelming majority of those 40,000 near-Earth asteroids are small enough to fit on the parking lot at the mall. And while these rocky runts won't cause Armageddon, they could still flatten such popular hominid hangouts as Manhattan or downtown Des Moines.
There is the global teenager hypothesis, that what happened in the '60s in America was that there was, the baby boom cohort grew up at the same time that television and popular music grew up, so that we had this carrier frequency that we all tuned into that gave us the feeling of a common culture, even though I was in Phoenix and someone was in Des Moines. That now we are getting the global cohort at the same time we have our first global communications. MTV is everywhere.
It's interesting for me to sell Comme des Garcons in places it's never been sold before to people who might not have heard of Comme des Garcons. — © Rei Kawakubo
It's interesting for me to sell Comme des Garcons in places it's never been sold before to people who might not have heard of Comme des Garcons.
I moved to Des Moines when I was 15. I asked my mother to give up costody and sign parental rights over to my grandmother, who I lived with while I went to school. I was clean and finally starting to figure myself out. I can only say that now without laughing. I was still very out of my own place, and I didn't even know what that place was. All I knew was that I could write music, that I had no idea what that could mean and that I was still surrounded by people I couldn't relate to. I hadn't found my tribe yet.
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.
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.
We're talking about an extremely prolific poet and songwriter and lyricist. That stuff comes off the top of her head. She [Joni Mitchell] will write exactly what she lives. If she puts some money in the soda machine, she'll write about putting money in the soda machine. "Dry Cleaner from Des Moines," on the Shadows & Light album, was about sitting next to a dry cleaner from Des Moines, playing a slot machine.
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.
How I found out is, I landed in Des Moines from a plane ride back from the Rob Zombie tour. I was, like, 'Okay, cool, I'm home. I can finally get some rest.' Once I landed, I turned my phone on, and my manager rang, and I'm, like, 'Oh, what?' He said, 'Paul Gray just died.'
This sounds corny, but I once told a kid when I was in a the library conference, the best - not the best, what I really hope for is that someday 20, 30 years from now, some kid, 12-year-old, 15-year-old, in Des Moines will be going through the stacks, if they have stacks anymore - they probably won't - and find a book of mine and get something from it.
I love it. It's all good to me. Whether I'm performing in New York, L.A., Columbus or Des Moines, I give 110 percent every night.
Rassemblons des faits pour nous donner des idées. Let us gather facts in order to get ourselves thinking.
You need to make a trip to Des Moines in August, because the Iowa State Fair really is a sight to see. The Iowa Fairgrounds are usually packed for those 11 days, and you get a real sense of what a classic Midwest fair is all about.
Most attractive males talk to most attractive women as if they were Rotarians comparing sales percentages in Des Moines.
I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.
I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It belongs to you. I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston. It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause.
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
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.
The first city I ever came to in the states was Des Moines. I was 12 and was in a boys' choir.
Alas! we see that the small have always suffered for the follies of the great. [Fr., Helas! on voit que de tout temps Les Petits ont pati des sottises des grands.]
I bought a bar because we got banned from playing everywhere else. We were too nuts, and everyone was scared of us. It was Des Moines, Iowa, remember.
Et une fois de plus je m'avan c° ais le long de ces me" mes couloirs, marchant depuis des jours, depuis des mois, depuis des anne es, a' votre rencontre. And one more time, I advanced along these same hallways, walking for days, for months, for years, to meet you.
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