Quotes from Charlie LeDuff

And then I settled into the most natural thing for a man with no real talents. Journalism.

We are born to a time. What you do with it is on you. Do the best you can. Try to be good. And live.

But wanderlust is like a pretty girl - you wake up one morning, find she's grown old and decide that either you're going to commit your life or you're going to walk away.

Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself.

But wanderlust is like a pretty girl - you wake up one morning, find she's grown old and decide that either you're going to commit your life or you're going to walk away.

Some people are doomed from birth because their environment is so toxic.

And then I settled into the most natural thing for a man with no real talents. Journalism.

The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don't have no goats in the streets.

And it is awful here, there is no other way to say it. But I believe that Detroit is America's city. It was the vanguard of our way up, just as it is the vanguard of our way down. And one hopes the vanguard of our way up again. Detroit is Pax Americana...America's way of life was built here.

The people in Detroit are poor, but most of them are good. There are things going on here beyond an ordinary person's control. These people are hungry and they have no job. No possibility of a job. They're stuck here.

Children are dying in this city because they're too fucking poor to keep warm. Put that in your fucking notebook. I put it in my fucking notebook.

Oh yeah? Go fuck yourself. He hung up. I called back ten minutes later, thinking it was an appropriate amount of time to have gone and fucked oneself.

I am a reporter, a leech, a merchant of misery. Bad things are good for us reporters. We are body collectors of sorts.

I was shown mold, leaking pipes, exposed asbestos insulation, broken toilets, cracked floors, malfunctioning heating units, feces bubbling up from the sewer pipes in the basements. I had seen better government buildings in the slums of Tijuana. Neven and the boys from 23 told me it was bad but what I was seeing was worse than the Baghdad fire department, which actually got more than one hundred fifty million dollars from the United States government, while Detroit got zero.

What our generation failed to learn was the nobility of work. An honest day's labor. The worthiness of the man in the white socks who would pull out a picture of his grandkids from his wallet. For us, the factory would never do. And turning away from our birthright—our grandfather in the white socks—is the thing that ruined us.

I learned that when one of them dies, the Irish comes out of the rest of them whether they are Irish or not. A firefighter is Irish by culture even if he is a black man, and there were plenty of them here. The firehouse is one of the few places in Detroit that is integrated at all. The blacks run the department, but its soul will always be Irish.

Since its founding, Detroit has been a place of perpetual flames. Three times the city has suffered race riots and three times the city has burned to the ground. The city's flag acknowledges as much. Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus: We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes.

He don't read. You know he doesn't have a book in his office? Not a fucking book in the shelves. Ain't that some shit? (Adolph Mongo speaking of Kwame Kilpatrick)

The city belongs to the black man. The white man was a convenient target until there were no white men left in Detroit. What used to be black and white is now gray. Whites got the suburbs and everything else. The black machine's got the city and the black machine's at war with itself. The spoils go to the one who understands that.

An earthmover was there, but instead of placing a casket into the ground, it was taking one out. They're removing the dead. Taking him to the suburbs. White flight. Black flight. Now dead flight.

Where was the police? Where was anybody?

Desperation, she said, feels like someone's reaching down your throat and ripping out your guts.

Somehow, the city of promise had become a scrap yard of dreams.

He called himself her pimp, except for the fact, he said, that he didn't like standing in the night air.