John Vaillant > Quotes

“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, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“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, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“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, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“Our listeners asked us:
"What is chaos?"
We're answering:
"We do not comment on economic policy.”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation,” he explained. “A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself—who is he really?”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“To say a tiger is an "outside" animal is an understatement that is best appreciated when a tiger is inside.”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“(..)Fate has al­ways been a po­tent force in Rus­sia, where, for gen­er­ations, cit­izens have had lit­tle con­trol over their own des­tinies. Fate can be a bitch, but, as Za­it­sev, Dvornik, and Onofre­cuk had dis­cov­ered, it can al­so be a tiger.”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“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, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“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, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“Since well before the Kung's engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian or Chinese but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the men--some more fluently than others.”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish.”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“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, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“Fear is not a sin in the taiga, but cow­ardice is [..].”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language?”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“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, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“He takes two tea bags in a four-ounce cup and he doesn’t mince words: when a pair of earnest British journalists once asked him how he thought the tigers could be saved, his answer, “AIDS,” caught them off guard.
“But don’t you care about people?” one of them asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “Especially not the Chinese.”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“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, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“British Columbia has been described as a banana republic, only with bigger bananas,”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“As long as they are carnivorous and/or humanoid, the monster's form matters little. Whether it is Tyrannosaurus rex, saber toothed tiger, grizzly bear, werewolf, bogeyman, vampire, Wendigo, Rangda, Grendel, Moby-Dick, Joseph Stalin, the Devil, or any other manifestation of the Beast, all are objects of dark fascination, in large part because of their capacity to consciously, willfully destroy us. What unites these creatures--ancient or modern, real or imagined, beautiful or repulsive, animal, human, or god--is their superhuman strength, malevolent cunning, and, above all, their capricious, often vengeful appetite--for us. This, in fact, is our expectation of them; it's a kind of contract we have. In this capacity, the seemingly inexhaustible power of predators to fascinate us--to "capture attention"--fulfills a need far beyond morbid titillation. It has a practical application. Over time, these creatures or, more specifically, the dangers they represent, have found their way into our consciousness and taken up permanent residence there. In return, we have shown extraordinary loyalty to them--to the point that we re-create them over and over in every medium, through every era and culture, tuning and adapting them to suit changing times and needs. It seems they are a key ingredient in the glue that binds us to ourselves and to each other.”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“Like Trush, Sheriff Gorunov is a born Alpha, a handsome, fire-breathing dragon of a man who smokes with an alarming vigor: cigarette clamped between his canines at the point where filter and tobacco meet, the act of inhaling fully integrated into breath and speech such that there is no discernible pause, only billowing smoke that seems to be a natural by-product of a voice that booms even in the confines of his quiet kitchen.”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“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, The Tiger

“But hope is a human construct, a coping mechanism in the face of uncertainty that holds no sway in the natural world.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“One reason the trees never get very big or very old is because, in spite of all that water, they burn down on a regular basis. They’re designed to. In this way, the circumboreal is truly a phoenix among ecosystems: literally reborn in fire, it must incinerate in order to regenerate, and it does so, in its random patchwork fashion, every fifty to a hundred years. This colossal biome stores as much, if not more, carbon than all tropical forests combined and, when it burns, it goes off like a carbon bomb.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“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, The Tiger

“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, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“I propose Homo flagrans. Flagrans is Latin for “ardent, fiery, passionate, outrageous.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“If a tree burns in the forest and nobody sees it…”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“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, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“Always the padre told us that the wine is the blood of Christ and it's Him you are drinking from the cup, His life on your lips. But the padre was wrong - blood is not life, water is”
― John Vaillant, The Jaguar's Children