Robert Kurson > Quotes

“When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself. It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is. Some people never get that moment. The U-Who is my moment. What I do now is what I am.”
― Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

“Most men, it seemed to them, went through life never really knowing themselves. A man might consider himself noble or brave or just, they believed, but until he was truly tested it would always be mere opinion.”
― Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

“If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. – If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. – Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. – Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“It wasn't who a person believed himself to be or what he pretended he would do in a given situation. It was what he did when he got there that defined him.”
― Robert Kurson, Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See

“In the United States, of the ten million certified scuba divers, it is likely that only a few hundred dive deep for shipwrecks. To those few, it is not a matter of if they will taste death, only of whether they'll swallow.”
― Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers

“In a world where even the moon had been traveled, the floor of the Atlantic remained uncharted wilderness, its shipwrecks beacons for men compelled to look.”
― Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

“Many dead divers have been found inside shipwrecks with more than enough air remaining to have made it to the surface. It is not that they chose to die, but rather that they could no longer figure out how to live.”
― Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

“After the meal, Borman dropped me off at my hotel, then went to visit his wife at the nursing home where she lives. As he drove away, it seemed to me strange—I felt I’d come to know Susan as well as I had Frank, despite having met her for just a few minutes, despite the fact that she had been too ill to speak. When I returned home and transcribed the tapes of my interviews, I understood why. Borman spoke of Susan constantly; there didn’t seem an aspect of his life he could explain without discussing how much she meant to him or how much he loved her. I’d heard the same from Lovell and Anders about their wives. When I discovered that Apollo 8 was the only crew in which all the marriages survived (astronaut careers were notoriously hard on marriages) it didn’t surprise me. In a singularly beautiful story, it seemed only fitting that the first men to leave Earth considered home to be the most important place in the universe.”
― Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

“...it was easy to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important is would be to further rely on oneself”
― Robert Kurson

“—Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“If a deep-wreck diver stays in the sport long enough, he will likely either come close to dying, watch another diver die, or die himself. There are times in this sport when it is difficult to say which of the three outcomes is worst.”
― Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers

“The feeling of a place was the best reason to go.”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“History was a crystal ball that told as much about the future as it did about the past.”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“Treasure shows who you really are. It strips away every façade you’ve constructed, every story you believe about yourself, and reveals the real you. If you are a miserable, lying, greedy, worthless fuck, treasure will tell you that. If you are a good and decent person, treasure will tell you that, too. And you needn’t find a single coin to know. It’s enough to get close to treasure, to believe it within reach, and you’ll have your answer, but once it happens it can’t be lied about and it can’t be bullshitted away. For that reason, treasure is crisis, because what you get in the end is yourself.”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“Not all divers succumb to panic as Drozd did. A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand fight or flight and narcosis carves order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason returns. In this way he overcomes his humanness and becomes something else. In this way, liberated from instincts, he becomes a freak of nature. To”
― Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

“Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.”
― Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

“He rolled with the unexpected—and much was unexpected on Seeker trips—because he believed in “No matter what.”
― Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

“more John Doe than Mike May. He played with this changing”
― Robert Kurson, Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See

“Telegrams for the astronauts poured in by the thousands. One, however, stood out from the rest. It came not from a world leader or celebrity or other luminary, but from an anonymous stranger.
It had traveled over whites-only lunch counters in the South, through jungles in Vietnam where young men fell, over the coffins of two of America’s great civil rights leaders. It had blown across the streets bloodied by protesters and police, past a segregationist presidential campaign, into radios playing songs of alienation and revolt. It had made its way through ten million American souls who didn’t have enough to eat, alongside generations that no longer trusted each other, into a White House where a no-longer-loved president slept.
It read:
THANKS. YOU SAVED 1968.”
― Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

“Reputation became the pirates' sharpest sword.”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“To those few, it is not a matter of if they will taste death, only of whether they’ll swallow.”
― Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

“treasure is crisis, because what you get in the end is yourself.”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.” Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson was”
― Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

“This is the greatest pirate story ever,” Bowden said. “And no one knows about it.”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“Sometimes the imagination could be even crueler than the bone saw.”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“only way to see what really mattered in life was to go to the places that were hardest to reach.”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“Stories were heirlooms in these parts.”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“with these decisions forever. – Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. – It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong. – The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world. – The worst possible decision is to give up.”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

“—  If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. —  If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. —  Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. —  Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever. —  Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. —  It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong.”
― Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

“Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.”
― Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II