Charles Kuralt Quotes

There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass

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.

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.

I was on the high school track team, believe it or not, and played baseball, poorly but passionately.

I don't know what makes a good feature story. I've always assumed that if it was a story that interested or amused me, that it would have the same impact on other people.

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.

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

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

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.

I made friends with a lot of those who could have criticized me in print and who didn't, who praised me instead.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I think the feature reporter often walks a very thin line between a truly human story and one that slops over into mushiness or sentimentality.

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

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

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

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.

Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.

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.

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

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.

I didn't have the ambition to be a broadcaster. I was going to be a newspaper reporter the rest of my life, but that opportunity came along.

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!

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

What I learned on the road. Above all else - to love my native land.

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

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.

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.

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

I'm not knocking the wholesale grocery business or any other, but there is a kind of romance in journalism which some people, the lucky ones, feel inside them all their lives.

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.

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.

I'm not any kind of social reformer.

I have spent a good part of my life looking for the perfect barbecue. There is no point in looking in places like Texas, where they put some kind of ketchup on beef and call it barbecue. Barbecue is pork, which narrows the search to the South, and if it's really good pork barbecue you are looking for, to North Carolina.

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.

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.

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.