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

“. . .(W)e are Canadians and not Americans because of a foolish war that scarcely anyone wanted or needed, but which, once launched, no one knew how to stop.”
― Pierre Berton, The Invasion of Canada: 1812-1813

“Strangers always ask me if I'm from Michigan. I say, "Why, do I have a Detroit-shaped face, circa 1960?" They all say yes, but I know they are lying, because I look more like Mackinac Island at the turn of the twentieth century.”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

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

“Michigan is still home to one of the most extreme human containment systems in the United States. Its prison population has increased by 450 percent since 1973, and the state maintains a higher rate of imprisonment than most countries. African Americans are the largest incarcerated group by far in Michigan, with a total population of 14 percent and a penal population of 49 percent. Latinos and Native Americans are incarcerated in Michigan at rates equal to their population percentage. However, white Michiganders, who make up 77 percent of the general population, are underrepresented in the prison population at 46 percent. Racialized sentencing policies have much to do with these statistics. Historians Heather Ann Thompson and Matthew Lassiter, the founding codirectors of the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan, point to "draconian" state legislation that by the 1990s included the infamous "lifer laws," which exacted life terms for narcotics possessions of over 650 grams and extinguished the opportunity for parole. As men and women were thrown behind bars for nonviolent offenses in the 1980s through the early 2000s, Detroit neighborhoods were gutted, children were orphaned, and voter rolls were depleted.”
― Tiya Miles, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“I feel like someone
has thrown a stone
into the heavens
and smashed the stars.

We are falling
from the sky.”
― Colby Cedar Smith, Call Me Athena: Girl from Detroit

“I am a former paramedic of Detroit EMS. While working the road, I encountered many hidden gems in Detroit that I went back to photograph. I created my book to share these wonderful places with others.”
― Leslie Cieplechowicz, Detroit Revealed: A Different View of the Motor City

“Detroit means a lot of things to a lot of different people. It’s a very clearly defined boundary line, but the interest and influence of the city reaches far beyond.”
― Alex B. Hill, Detroit in 50 Maps

“Let the dead stay dead-- all of them.”
― Gary Hardwick, Cold Medina

“Families are created in flesh, bound by blood, and destroyed in humanity.”
― Gary Hardwick, Double Dead

“Cane dreaded entering the church. This was God's place. But it was night. That made things just about even.”
― Gary Hardwick, Double Dead

“Baseball is a resplendent metaphor for life.”
― Gary Hardwick, Dark Town Redemption

“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