John Vaillant Quotes

#1. 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

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

John Vaillant

#3. 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

#4. A writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave.

Stephen King

#5. 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

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

John Vaillant

#7. 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

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

John Vaillant

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

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

John Vaillant

#12. 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

#13. So it is that we are unhappy we sense more acutely the unhappiness of others; rather than dispersing, the emotion becomes focused ...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#14. Anything so that we can stop talking about me and what an utmost disappointment I am.

Mary Kubica

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

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

John Vaillant

#19. Nobles' sons are one of nature's great destructive forces, like floods or tornadoes. When you're struck with one of these catastrophes, the only thing an average man can do is grit his teeth and try to minimize the damage.

Patrick Rothfuss

#20. Having grown up on 'Star Trek,' I've had one great dream since childhood, and that is to see my life end somewhere other than here on Earth.

Thomas P.M. Barnett

#21. We are either part of the problem, or part of the solution...what are we doing each day to try and solve the most troubling human problems?

Tim Spiess

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

John Vaillant

#23. 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