Charles Kuralt famous quotes

When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. We don't honor them enough, we don't pay them enough.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Wise #Wisdom #Teacher

Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Teacher #Literature #Students

The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Love #Inspirational #Family

There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.
-- Charles Kuralt

#People #Greed #Literature

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Book #Library #Literature

It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Country #Flames #People

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Reading #Believe #Writing

I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Memorable #Thinking #Rivers

Often I have been exhausted on trout streams, uncomfortable, wet, cold, briar scarred, sunburned, mosquito bitten, but never, with a fly rod in my hand have I been less than in a place that was less than beautiful.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Beautiful #Hands #Fishing

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Country #Moon #People

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Inspirational #Funny #Country

I didn't know what narcissism was until I beheld my own naricssus.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Desire #Narcissism

The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Kindness #Greed #Everyday

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Country #Stars #Fun

TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Hate #Writing #Air

We always take credit for the good and attribute the bad to fortune.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Achievement #Credit #Fortune

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Philosophy #People #Important

For a while there, I was a stringer. The expression comes from the old habit of stringing together the column inches that you had written. They'd measure it and pay you 10 cents an inch for your printed copy.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Expression #Old Habits #Together

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Mother #Father #Kids

Most of those old settlers told it like it was, rough and rocky. They named their towns Rimrock, Rough Rock, Round Rock, and Wide Ruins, Skull Valley, Bitter Springs, Wolf Hole, Tombstone. It's a tough country. The names of Arizona towns tell you all you need to know.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Country #Tombstone #Spring

You never heard anybody ask 'Elvis who?'
-- Charles Kuralt

#Heard

There is such a thing as a national conscience, and it can be touched.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Conscience

My parents encouraged me in everything I ever wanted to do.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Parent #Wanted

I used to think that driving, sleepless, ambitious labor was what you needed to succeed.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Thinking #Insomnia #Ambitious

Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Hero #Luck #Worship

I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Falling In Love #Writing #Trying

I suppose I was a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn't have girlfriends, and really I wasn't a very social boy.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Girlfriend #Boys #Dating

I don't think one should ever come to my stage of life and have to look back and say, Gosh. I wish I hadn't spent all those years doing that job I was never really interested in.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Jobs #Thinking #Years

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a reporter. I don't know where I got the idea that it was a romantic calling.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Ideas #Calling #Want

I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Literature #Reader

In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Light #Fields #Gone

I didn't like the competitiveness of big-time journalism.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Journalism #Bigs #Competitiveness

It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Love You #Mind #Privilege

I don't think I had a reputation as a hard worker, but inside I was always being eaten up by the pressures.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Thinking #Pressure #Reputation

I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Happiness #Thinking #People

You can't travel the back roads very long without discovering a multitude of gentle people doing good for others with no expectation of gain or recognition. The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines. Some people out there spend their whole lives selflessly.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Kindness #People #Expectations

...Pomeranians speak only to Poodles and Poodles speak only to God.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Dog #Pomeranians #Poodles

A true Southerner will never say in 2-3 words what can better be said in 10-12.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Southern #Said #Southerner

What you need for breakfast, they say in East Tennessee, is a jug of good corn liquor, a thick steak and a hound dog. Then you feed the steak to the dog.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Dog #Southern #Jugs

It was cold out there, bitter, biting, cutting, piercing, hyperborean, marmoreal cold, and there were all these Minnesotans running around outdoors, happy as lambs in the spring.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Running #Spring #Cutting

America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Rivers #America #Stories

Kids are always asked, What are you going to be when you grow up? I needed an answer. So instead of saying, a fireman, or a policeman, I said, a reporter.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Growing Up #Kids #Firefighter

Look for joy in your life; it's not always easy to find.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Joy #Looks #Easy

To read the papers and to listen to the news... one would think the country is in terrible trouble. You do not get that impression when you travel the back roads and the small towns do care about their country and wish it well.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Country #Book #Reading

I think I'd have done better if I had been a little more relaxed-if I had not pressed quite so hard, if I'd not lost quite so much sleep.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Sleep #Thinking #Done

The sparrows are preparing for winter, each one dressed in a plain brown coat and singing a cheerful song.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Song #Winter #Singing

The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Reality #People #Remember

You can find your way across this country using burger joint the way a navigatior uses stars....We have munched Bridge burgers in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and Cable burgers hard by the Golden Gate, Dixie burgers in the sunny South and Yankee Doodle burgers in the North....We had a Capitol Burger - guess where. And so help us, in the inner courtyard of the Pentagon, a Penta burger.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Country #Stars #Bridges

I would like to explore some side roads in life while I am still in good health and good spirits.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Sides #Spirit #Good Health

I'm not any kind of social reformer.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Kind #Social

There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass
-- Charles Kuralt

#Wind #Sorrow #Melancholy

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Morning #School #Kids

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Fun #America #Years

My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Mother #Workout #Father

Now that I look back on it, having retired from being a reporter, it was kind of romantic. It was a wonderful way to live one's life, just as I imagined it would be when I was 6 or 7.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Romantic Love #Way #Would Be

Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Retirement #School #Trying

When I was a little boy I used to borrow my father's hat, and make a press card to stick in the hat band. That was the way reporters were always portrayed in the movies.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Father #Hate #Boys

When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Interesting #Important #Woods

The first books I was interested in were all about baseball. But I can't think of one single book that changed my life in any way.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Baseball #Book #Thinking

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Illinois #Years #Two

Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people.... We are a nation rich in rivers.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Running #Rivers #People

Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people. They nourish and refresh us and provide a home for dazzling varieties of fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich in rivers.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Running #Home #Rivers

I can't say that I've changed anybody's life, ever, and that's the real work of the world, if you want a better society.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Real #World #Want

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Writing #Thinking #Years

It is liberalism, whether people like it or not, which has animated all the years of my life. What on Earth did conservatism ever accomplish for our country?
-- Charles Kuralt

#Country #Years #People

What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well, or the bell, or the stone walls, or the crisp October nights or the memory of dogwoods blooming. Our loyalty is not only to William Richardson Davie though we are proud of what he did 200 years ago today. Nor even to Dean Smith, though we are proud of what he did last March. No, our love for this place is based on the fact that it is as it was meant to be, the University of the people.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Loyalty #Wall #Memories

I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air.
-- Charles Kuralt

#Jobs #Good Luck #Years