Charlie LeDuff > Quotes

“Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“Some people are doomed from birth because their environment is so toxic.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“And then I settled into the most natural thing for a man with no real talents.
Journalism.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“I am a reporter, a leech, a merchant of misery. Bad things are good for us reporters. We are body collectors of sorts.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“In Detroit, it's so fucking poor that fire is cheaper than a movie. A can of gas is $3.50 and movie is 8 bucks. But there aren't any movie theaters left in Detroit so fuck it. They burn the empty house next door and they sit on the fucking porch with a 40, and they're barbecuing and laughing because it's fucking entertainment.”
― Charlie LeDuff

“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

“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.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“He called himself her pimp, except for the fact, he said, that he didn't like standing in the night air.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“Desperation, she said, feels like someone's reaching down your throat and ripping out your guts.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“I am not the best gauger of destitution, my judgment having been warped by years of reporting in Detroit. By comparison, in cities like St. Louis and Chicago and Los Angeles, the “ghettos” appear relatively nice. Livable. No falling-in porches. In West Side Chicago, the streets were paved and swept. The apartment buildings occupied. The grass cut and the stores full. What was more, there was foot traffic.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Sh*tshow!: The Country's Collapsing . . . and the Ratings Are Great

“What galleries and museums have to do with a dead man is beyond me. Writing about shit like that in the city we were living in seemed equal to writing about the surf conditions while reporting in the Gaza Strip.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“He understood that everybody’s somebody to someone. He”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“that ideal had become as ossified as the statue of Benjamin Franklin up there. From New York to Los Angeles, American newspapers were yellow and stale before they even came off the press. Dog-beaten by a dwindling readership, financial losses and partisan attacks, editors had stripped them of their personality in an attempt to offend no one. And so there was no more reason to read them. Safety before Truth. Grammar over Guts. Winners before Losers. My eyes traveled down from Franklin to the iron sconces above the entrance.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“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

“People in uniform will tell you that no one life is more important than another. The lives of a white cop, a black fireman, a minister and a drug addict all have equal value. But the presumption is that if a person in uniform is killed with impunity, if such a killer is allowed to run free, then no regular citizen is safe. So for the sake of civil order, when a person in uniform is murdered, heads must get knocked, doors must be kicked in and every available cop is put to the task.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“The timing of Moroun’s hat giveaway stunt was as unfortunate as the selection of hats themselves. They were not your run-of-the-mill knitwear; they were, in fact, ski masks. The type gunmen use to stick up liquor stores.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“Somehow, the city of promise had become a scrap yard of dreams.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“Anyway, you now owe $117,500 on the house. After that five years, once the house gets 90 percent loan-to-value—that means you’re getting close to getting underwater—the bank ‘recasts’ the loan and now flips you to a full am, which means you pay an old-fashioned mortgage, which is principal plus interest on $117,000. You now have a thirty-year loan at 7 percent. Plus you have to buy the mortgage insurance because you don’t have anything down, which puts you somewhere at $900 a month. Your payments have more than tripled overnight. A $200,000 house is now costing you $1,800 a month and we both know the guy was never making that kind of money.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy