John Vaillant · 288 pages
Rating: (5.1K votes)
“Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“There is a saying among the peoples of the Northwest Coast: “The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife,” and Robert Davidson, the man responsible for carving Masset’s first post-missionary pole, imagines this edge as a circle. “If you live on the edge of the circle,” he explained in a documentary film, “that is the present moment. What’s inside is knowledge, experience: the past. What’s outside has yet to be experienced. The knife’s edge is so fine that you can live either in the past or in the future. The real trick,” says Davidson, “is to live on the edge.”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“It is an eccentric and uniquely human approach to resources: like plowing under your farmland to make way for more lawns, or compromising your air quality in exchange for an enormous car.”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsm of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book.”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“British Columbia has been described as a banana republic, only with bigger bananas,”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“Their houses are the size of small airplane hangars; their carved”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“Traveling in these giant cedar canoes, the Haida would regularly paddle their home into, and out of, existence. With each collective paddle stroke they would have seen their islands sinking steadily into the sea while distant snow-covered peaks scrolled up before them like a new planet. Few people alive today have any notion of how it might feel to pull worlds up from beyond the horizon by faith and muscle alone.”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“June is a bad month for bugs in Alaska; generally it takes a good five or ten knots of breeze to keep them at bay, but even then they will tend to hover in your lee, waiting for the wind to die. Mosquitoes swarm so thickly up there that they can, like clouds, briefly form recognizable shapes. This is probably the only circumstance in nature where it is possible to look downwind and see a shadow of oneself infused with one's own blood.”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
John Vaillant
Born place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, The United States
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“What would have happened had he not been killed? He would certainly have had a rocky road to the nomination. The power of the Johnson administration and much of the party establishment was behind Humphrey. Still, the dynamism was behind Kennedy, and he might well have swept the convention. If nominated, he would most probably have beaten the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Individuals do make a difference to history. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have brought a quick end to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Those thousands of Americans—and many thousands more Vietnamese and Cambodians—who were killed from 1969 to 1973 would have been at home with their families. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have consolidated and extended the achievements of John Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The liberal tide of the 1960s was still running strong enough in 1969 to affect Nixon’s domestic policies. The Environmental Protection Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act with its CETA employment program were all enacted under Nixon. If that still fast-flowing tide so influenced a conservative administration, what signal opportunities it would have given a reform president! The confidence that both black and white working-class Americans had in Robert Kennedy would have created the possibility of progress toward racial reconciliation. His appeal to the young might have mitigated some of the under-thirty excesses of the time. And of course the election of Robert Kennedy would have delivered the republic from Watergate, with its attendant subversion of the Constitution and destruction of faith in government. RRK”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from Robert Kennedy and His Times
“We live in all we seek.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
“What of your vows of vengeance?" "I'm not adding you to the list, if that's what you're wondering. It's over. I know what I am.”
― Elaine Cunningham, quote from Dark Journey
“Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in. Meaning: you already knew how deep the love was, how instinctually you felt about someone.
What happened in their first five minutes?
Time stopped.”
― Laura Dave, quote from London is the Best City in America
“If you look at your circumstances you will put off doing what God is telling you to do. It can seem like the worst time to do whatever God says to do. BUT there is an anointing on "now" if God has told you to act.”
― Joyce Meyer, quote from Beauty for Ashes: Receiving Emotional Healing
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