Detroit Quotes

“Where I grew up, women’s liberation was when you let a chick out of her cage so she could stretch her legs for 15 minutes.”
― John Rachel

“If a man hasn’t found something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“I bought salvation from a man on the street. He said, "Go down to the beach and let the waves wash your feet.”
― Gabriel Rheaume

“There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living, whose reason for being might be geographical but whose growth is based on industry, jobs. Detroit has its natural attractions: lakes all over the place, an abundance of trees and four distinct seasons for those who like variety in their weather, everything but hurricanes and earth-quakes. But it’s never been the kind of city people visit and fall in love with because of its charm or think, gee, wouldn’t this be a nice place to live.”
― Elmore Leonard

“And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you'd either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“It’s hard not to empathize with the mayor’s anger, given the injustices he’d suffered, but righteous anger rarely leads to wise policy.”
― Edward L. Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier

“It'll come back," Ulysses says again. "This place isn't made for disappearing, it's a place for resurrection.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“The exact opposite of the huge car factories she imagines as the city's womb, a uterus that makes automobiles the way others make promises, or laws.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“For I believe the spiritual combat to be more desperate in the center of chaos, which is Detroit.”
― Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke

“More than two days in Detroit is not permitted the human psyche.”
― Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke

“Where would you like me to take you?"

"Oh, Monksie, you know how I've always been about traveling. You decide. I'll be happy with wherever you pick."

"Detroit," I said.

The expression that crawled over and sat on her face was precious and let me know that she was no vegetable yet.

"Just joking," I said.

"I should say.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“People thought Fort Détroit was protected by an alliance of demons: the Catholics' Satan, the Odawa's Wendigo, and Nain Rouge, or the Demon of the Strait. The Americans wanted nothing to do with it.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“Seems to me what it comes down to is, if a city's founded on a crime--"

"Détroit is founded on a dream as much as a crime...”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“Lac Sainte-Claire is itself a creature of the wild, a world where the synthetic and the organic commingle. At this early hour, it looks like a sheet of quicksilver being shaken by invisible hands. Then, as morning brings heat and light, plastic objects, immersed steel structures, and an oily sheen become visible on its surface. Large ships advance in cavernous silence, waterfowl rise above the horizon.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“It's called slash-and-burn. We set fire to the whole field. The old folk did it that way 'stead of sawin' down trees. It works on fallow fields, too, or where plants are done for the year. The fire turns them into fertilizer that goes straight into the ground. It works, but it's hard on the soil. On cities, too, for that matter. You know, Fort Détroit was kind of made out of slash-and-burn.”
― Catherine Leroux

“It got to be a tradition: we set fires when we're happy, we set fires when we're not, we set fires when we've got nothin' better to do. It got so the city itself stepped in. It burns itself down. Houses combust spontaneously, entire blocks go up in flames at our city's will.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“All Detroit is divided into three parts: the automobile industry, the city government, and the casinos. Of those parts, only one has never had to go to Washington to beg for money. Guess which.”
― Loren D. Estleman, Smoke on the Water

“I drive through neighborhoods that have looked like this
for thirty years, only with time and in the rain the worse.
There always is a bit of lace on windows, a new
painted fence, old roses saved from the weeds'
stranglehold, and it takes so much more courage now,
when so much of what is left is field.”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“Look at that building shaped by
two streets colliding into an avenue
someone took trouble over the Doric columns,
marble balcony,
beyond plywood boarding windows
Catch obsidian glances on polished stone
and here on this empty street
Lift yourself up until you can trace with your finger
the whorls of that long-gone gable”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“Don't turn your back on this tour
of a city of lost opportunities
Don't close your eyes
you'll miss beneath asphalt
the cobblestones, over a hundred years old,
brownstone houses lining the street
Paradise Valley,
swamp, they said, to be sucked dry
sanitized to glass boxes
hung over the river”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“When first I came to Detroit they took me, well-wishers,
to show me the materialized American dream
what
if I persisted and worked very very hard
I still could never have”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“Now, in the hush of morning, she wondered if anyone had seen her, smelled her fire, heard her. Detroit nights were full of wild sounds.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“Dune had been a young skeptic, not seeing why both of her parents were so obsessed with Detroit. Everything was falling apart, everyone was leaving--all she and her classmates talked about was where else they were going to go. She dreamed of living in a real city, a growing city. Detroit was not a destination.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“Dune also noticed the ways in which Detroit was obstinately itself. No one stopped at red lights, just slowed down and rolled on through. This was usual at night, but now as the city shrank, she saw it happen more and more often in broad daylight from the porch. Who had life to waste waiting at these uncontested lights?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“A developer from DC arrived in August saying he had figured out a solution to H-8. He was given a front-page story in the Detroit News, above the fold. The photo of the white man--dark hair combed back in a smooth wave, suit crisp--felt familiar. Dune wondered if there was a factory somewhere that just produced white men who could see the future of Detroit, a place where she could go and toss a wrench in the gears. She was not surprised that he knew nothing and slipped away from the public eye when it became clear that the only abundance he could tap into was panic.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“She couldn't look at social media--her notifications were full of people sending "prayers and love" to her, or her family, or to the city of Detroit. At some point, these trite condolences had replaced the act of grieving, of actually feeling a wave of sadness.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers

“She grabbed all the food she could load into her bike's saddle baskets. She was trying to balance a massive squash on top when two men walked around the corner, laughing with each other. They were unhurried, at ease with each other. Black men in Detroit gave off a sense of being unflappable, adapting to the changing conditions with a shrug and a swagger.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers