John Vaillant Quotes

#1. 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

#2. He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish.

John Vaillant

#3. British Columbia has been described as a banana republic, only with bigger bananas,

John Vaillant

#4. The impact of an attacking tiger can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning.

John Vaillant

#5. In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: 'Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov.

John Vaillant

#6. Nothing exists now but the tiger, filling his field of vision like a bad accident, like the end of the world: a pair of blazing yellow lanterns over a temple door framed with ivory columns.

John Vaillant

#7. 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

#8. The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first.

John Vaillant

#9. Our listeners asked us:
"What is chaos?"
We're answering:
"We do not comment on economic policy.

John Vaillant

#10. Markov died while trying to fit a small, slippery shotgun shell into a narrow gun barrel, in the dark, at thirty below zero - with a tiger bearing down on him from ten yards away.

John Vaillant

#11. What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language?

John Vaillant

#12. To say a tiger is an "outside" animal is an understatement that is best appreciated when a tiger is inside.

John Vaillant

#13. Successful hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends on how successfully a hunter inserts himself into the umwelt of his prey
even to the point of disguising himself as that animal and mimicking its behavior.

John Vaillant

#14. The tiger will see you a hundred times before you see him once.

John Vaillant

#15. I've read a tiger's not dangerous,
They say the tiger won't attack
But one thing's not clear to me.
Has he read this, too? Does he know?

John Vaillant

#16. 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

#17. Their houses are the size of small airplane hangars; their carved

John Vaillant