Quotes from Robert Kurson

Life is a matter of luck, and the odds in favor of success are in no way enhanced by extreme caution. — WWII German U-Boat Commander Eric Topp

Along the way, each marveled at how easy it was to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important it would be to further rely on oneself.

As Nagle spiraled deeper into alcoholism and resentment, Chatterton managed much of his friend's business, so that the Seeker could remain viable.

One day Nagle paid him the highest compliment by saying, "When you die no one will ever find your body.

If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. —  If you follow in another's footsteps, you miss

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.

There is pressure when you have a very big book like 'Shadow Divers' to follow up with something big. But you can't let that pressure determine what you do. You just look for the best stories, and when you find a great one, you tell it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.

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.

The feeling of a place was the best reason to go.

History was a crystal ball that told as much about the future as it did about the past.

He rolled with the unexpected—and much was unexpected on Seeker trips—because he believed in "No matter what.

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.

This is the greatest pirate story ever," Bowden said. "And no one knows about it.

Stories were heirlooms in these parts.

Sometimes the imagination could be even crueler than the bone saw.