Charlie LeDuff Quotes

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

Charlie LeDuff

#2. 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.

Charlie LeDuff

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

Charlie LeDuff

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

Charlie LeDuff

#5. Where was the police? Where was anybody?

Charlie LeDuff

#6. 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.

Charlie LeDuff

#7. He understood that everybody's somebody to someone. He

Charlie LeDuff

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

Charlie LeDuff

#9. 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.

Charlie LeDuff

#10. 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.

Charlie LeDuff

#11. If we were poets, we'd starve on words.

Charlie LeDuff

#12. 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.

Charlie LeDuff

#13. Somehow, the city of promise had become a scrap yard of dreams. But fighters do what they do best when they've

Charlie LeDuff

#14. In Detroit, we all talked the race game. It is a way of life.

Charlie LeDuff

#15. There's not much a newspaper reporter can do about dead men. But a newspaper reporter and a cop and a judge can deliver some justice. That's why the founding fathers wrote it up the way they did, I suppose. Life. Liberty. Pursuit of happiness. Everyone is entitled to those things.

Charlie LeDuff

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

Charlie LeDuff

#17. 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.

Charlie LeDuff

#18. At the end of the day, the Detroiter may be the most important American there is because no one knows better than he that we're all standing at the edge of the shaft.

Charlie LeDuff

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

Charlie LeDuff

#20. 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.

Charlie LeDuff

#21. 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)

Charlie LeDuff

#22. 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.

Charlie LeDuff