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Robert Kurson Quotes

Total quotes: 8
“It's what a person does at the moment of greatest struggle that shows him who he really is. Some people get that moment. This 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
Tagged: Life
“Always answer the first problem immediately and fully, or you're fucking dead.”
— Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
Tagged: strategy
“The guy who gets kill 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, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
Tagged: Life
“Not all divers succumb to panic as Drozd did. A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. A 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 arrive at such a state, the diver must know the creases and folds of dread, so that when it leaps on him inside a wreck he is dealing with an old friend. The process can take years. It often requires study, discussion, practice, mentoring, contemplation, and hard experience. At work, he nods when the boss reveals the latest sale figures, but he is thinking, 'Whatever else is wrong inside a shipwreck, if you are breathing you are okay.' Paying bills or setting the VCR at home, he tells himself, 'If you find trouble inside a wreck, slow down. Fall back. Talk yourself through it.' As he gains more experience, he will meditate upon what every great diver advises him: 'Fix the first problem fully and calmly before you ever think about the second problem.'”
— Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
Tagged: Life
“Here is what happens to a panicked diver in trouble inside a shipwreck:

His heart and respiratory rates jump. At 200 feet, when every lungful of air requires seven times the volume as that on the surface, a panicked diver can breathe down his tanks so quickly that the needles on his gauges begin to drop into the red before his eyes. That sight further quickens his heart and breath, which in turn further reduces the time he has to solve his problems. Heavier respiration also means heavier narcosis. Narcosis amplifies panic. A vicious cycle has begun.”
— Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
Tagged: Life
“As weeks turned to months and Chatterton continued to distinguish himself, he studied himself and others in action, watched soldiers live and die and show courage and break down, paid careful attention to the behavior of men around him, all to divine further insight into the right way to live. Gradually, he distilled certain principles that seemed to him indisputable truths, and he collected these principles like so many medicines in the aid pack of his mind. As he neared the end of his six-month field obligation, he had come to believe these things:

–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
Tagged: Life
“For four months, Chatterton thought about the right way and the wrong way to live, and he continued to contemplate his principles. As one patrol bled into another and men died, his thinking solidified, and he began to consider that it might have been for these insights that he had come to Vietnam, that when he had looked into forever over the Atlantic as a child and felt sure that there was more on the other side, it was these ideas that were calling him, ideas about how a man should 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
Tagged: Life
“A diver lost or tangled inside a shipwreck has come face-to-face with his maker. Corpses have been recovered inside wrecks–eyes and mouths agape in terror, the poor diver still lost, still blinded, still snagged, still pinned. Yet a curious truth pertains to these perils: rarely does the problem itself kill the diver. Rather, the diver's response to the problem–his panic–likely determines whether he lives or dies.”
— Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
Tagged: Life
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