Top 80 Charles Kuralt Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It takes an earthquake to remind us that we walk on the crust of an unfinished planet.”

— Charles Kuralt

2. “Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.”

— Charles Kuralt

3. “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

4. “The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.”

— Charles Kuralt

5. “The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.”

— Charles Kuralt

6. “Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.”

— Charles Kuralt

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “New York is the true City of Light in any season.”

— Charles Kuralt

11. “We always take credit for the good and attribute the bad to fortune.”

— Charles Kuralt

12. “I would like to explore some side roads in life while I am still in good health and good spirits.”

— Charles Kuralt

13. “I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.”

— Charles Kuralt

14. “There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass.”

— Charles Kuralt

15. “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

16. “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

17. “America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.”

— Charles Kuralt

18. “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

19. “A true Southerner will never say in 2-3 words what can better be said in 10-12.”

— Charles Kuralt

20. “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

21. “And still I wander, seeking compensation in unforseen encounters and unexpected sights, in sunsets, storms and passing fancies.”

— Charles Kuralt

22. “If there are bleachers in heaven and a warm sun, that’s where you’ll find Bill Veeck.”

— Charles Kuralt

23. “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

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24. “Look for joy in your life; it’s not always easy to find.”

— Charles Kuralt

25. “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

26. “The storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don’t know where it arose, but it’s still there. You can’t go to the feed store, or the country courthouse without running into storytellers.”

— Charles Kuralt

27. “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

28. “I wasn’t a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.”

— Charles Kuralt

29. “Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.”

— Charles Kuralt

30. “I didn’t know what narcissism was until I beheld my own naricssus.”

— Charles Kuralt

31. “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

32. “The greatest thing you can do in life is to tell a young boy or girl that they’re ‘the very best’ at something – baseball, reading, art. That gives them the wonderful feeling that they can do anything, which they can!”

— Charles Kuralt

33. “You never heard anybody ask ‘Elvis who?’”

— Charles Kuralt

34. “I gained a great appreciation for what I would call the collective achievement of the country. I began thinking of America as a much more just and humane place than I would have thought if I’d been covering the civil rights struggle.”

— Charles Kuralt

35. “My parents encouraged me in everything I ever wanted to do.”

— Charles Kuralt

36. “I had a tight stomach all the time. I actually developed ulcers. I’ve learned better than to put all that internal pressure on myself.”

— Charles Kuralt

37. “I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary.”

— Charles Kuralt

38. “I much preferred the peaceful life on the road, where I didn’t have to ask embarrassing questions and do all the things real reporters have to do.”

— Charles Kuralt

39. “In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.”

— Charles Kuralt

40. “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

41. “The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.”

— Charles Kuralt

42. “That was the overwhelming thing to me, the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it.”

— Charles Kuralt

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “What I learned on the road. Above all else – to love my native land.”

— Charles Kuralt

49. “You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.”

— Charles Kuralt

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50. “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