John Vaillant · 288 pages
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“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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“Despite these criticisms of his criticisms, my stance has a major problem, one that causes Morse to conclude that the contributions of neuroscience to the legal system “are modest at best and neuroscience poses no genuine, radical challenges to concepts of personhood, responsibility, and competence.”25 The problem can be summarized in a hypothetical exchange: Prosecutor: So, professor, you’ve told us about the extensive damage that the defendant sustained to his frontal cortex when he was a child. Has every person who has sustained such damage become a multiple murderer, like the defendant? Neuroscientist testifying for the defense: No. Prosecutor: Has every such person at least engaged in some sort of serious criminal behavior? Neuroscientist: No. Prosecutor: Can brain science explain why the same amount of damage produced murderous behavior in the defendant? Neuroscientist: No. The problem is that, even amid all these biological insights that allow us to be snitty about those silly homunculi, we still can’t predict much about behavior. Perhaps at the statistical level of groups, but not when it comes to individuals.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, quote from Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“What you must first understand is the very nature of the Verity. Humans have a tendency for darkness and light. To choose good or evil. But no such mixture exists for the Verity or the Void. The Void houses no light. The Verity embraces no darkness. So when the Verity seeks a new vessel, it always searches out the purest heart--the person least likely to be swayed by darkness. A heart so true has the capacity to love like no other. And a love like that? It changes a person.”
― Sara Ella, quote from Unblemished
“When we’re in nature, we move toward what elicits our best qualities. When we need a boost of confidence, joy, courage, or love, we’re attracted to those flowers that evoke those qualities within us. After spending time around trees and flowers, we actually feel different; we can feel all kinds of positive qualities rising up within us. Those qualities are already within us, but it’s being in nature that wakes up those feelings inside us and remind us—with a visceral experience—of who we are.”
― Katie Hess, quote from Flowerevolution: Blooming into Your Full Potential with the Magic of Flowers
“The absolute truth is a wicked sort of rush. It’s far more amusing than any lie. Both have the potential to empower and to hurt, but the truth is emotionally superior. Few people could fault you for it, not when you’ve got ethics on your side. The truth is morally unassailable. But”
― Tanya Thompson, quote from Assuming Names: A Con Artist's Masquerade
“Seeing them butcher the dead . . . I don’t know, Father . . . It makes me question my faith in mankind, in people being good deep down, not savages, not like that.”
― Mark T. Sullivan, quote from Beneath a Scarlet Sky
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