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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“I frowned. Evidently, Sangris wasn't a cat who could shape-shift. It was more difficult than that. He was a nothing who occasionally pretended to be a cat. "I wish I could know what it's like for myself, that's all," I said. I felt rather the way a jail inmate would if a bird flew up and shouted through her window bars: This freedom thing? Yeah, not so great.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, quote from The Girl with Borrowed Wings
“...but I had learned over the years that if you're not happy doing what you're doing, then you shouldn't be doing it.”
― Billy Crystal, quote from Still Foolin' 'Em: Where I've Been, Where I'm Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys
“Soon college would be out, I would join the ranks of the matriculated, and the real world would steal me for one of their own.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, quote from The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories
“She leaned down so she was looking right in my eyes. "You hear me, child. you can't use other folks' bad behavior to excuse your own. When we got a choice, we keep Jesus in our hearts and don't do nothing that would make him ashamed.”
― Susan Crandall, quote from Whistling Past the Graveyard
“Job, chapter fourteen, verse seven,” Aunt Al said. “ ‘For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease.’ ”
― Jeannette Walls, quote from The Silver Star
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