Gary Snyder Quotes

All those years and their moments - Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text.

I don't know of any other city where you can walk through so many culturally diverse neighborhoods, and you're never out of sight of the wild hills. Nature is very close here.

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetratio n for all.

They should listen to the unsaid words that resonate around the edge of the poem.

All this new stuff goes on top
turn it over, turn it over
wait and water down
from the dark bottom
turn it inside out
let it spread through
Sift down even.
Watch it sprout.
A mind like compost.

Spring-water in the green creek is clear Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white Silent knowledge - the spirit is enlightened of itself Contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness.

In the mountains it's cold.
Always been cold, not just this year.
Jagged scarps forever snowed in
Woods in the dark ravines spitting mist.
Grass is still sprouting at the end of June,
Leaves begin to fall in early August.
And here I am, high on mountains,
Peering and peering, but I can't even see the sky.

You run into people who want to write poetry who don't want to read anything in the tradition. That's like wanting to be a builder but not finding out what different kinds of wood you use.

The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.

In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.

True affluence is to not need anything.

I hold the most archaic values on earth ... the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude ... the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden.

Oil the saw, sharpen axes,
Learn the names of all the peaks you see and which is highest-
there are hundreds-
Learn by heart the drainages between
Go find a shallow pool of snowmelt on a good day, bathe in the lukewarm water.

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void.

Gratitude to the Great Sky who holds billions of stars - and goes yet beyond that - beyond all powers, and thoughts and yet is within us - Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain
The pine sings, but there's no wind.
Who can leap the world's ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

Streams and mountains never stay the same.

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

Clarity, especially in poetry, requires conceiving of your work as a collaborative act of imagination with the audience, thus affording them the deepest respect.

Each time you go that road it gets more straight.

We ... must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is.

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

Every boulder on a talus slope is different, no two needles on a fir tree are identical. How could one part be more central, more important, than any other?

You don't want to be victimized by your lesser talents.

Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place.

the man who has the soul of the wolf
knows the self-restraint
of the wolf

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

All that we did was human,
stupid, easily forgiven,
Not quite right.

Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.

Wildness It is perennially within us, dormant as a hard-shelled seed, awaiting the fire or flood that awakes it again.

If we are here for any good purpose at all (other than collating texts, running rivers, and learning the stars), I suppose it is to entertain the rest of nature. A gang of sexy primate clowns. All the little critters creep in close to listen when the human beings are in a good mood and willing to play some tunes.

In Paul Friedrich's book Proto-Indo-European Trees he identifies the "semantic primitives" of the Indo-European tribe of languages through a group of words that have not changed much through twelve thousand years - and those are tree names: especially birch, willow, adler, elm, ash, apple and beech (bher, wyt, alysos, ulmo, os, abul, bhago). Seed syllables, bija, of the life of the west.

You should really know what the complete natural world of your region is and know what all its interactions are and how you are interacting with it yourself. This is just part of the work of becoming who you are, where you are.

For those who can, one of the things to do is not to move. To stay put. That doesn't mean don't travel; it means have a place and get involved in what can be done in that place. That's the only way we're going to have a representative democracy in America. Nobody stays anywhere long enough to take responsibility for a local community.

I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness America your stupidity. I could almost love you again.

We are, after all, an animal that was brought into being on this biosphere by these processes of sun and water and lead. And if we depart too far from them, we're departing too far from the mother, from our heritage.

White clouds gather and billow. Thin grass does for a mattress, The blue sky makes a good quilt. Happy with a stone underhead Let heaven and earth go about their changes.

the mind poet stays in the house / the house is empty and it has no walls / the poem is seen from all sides / everywhere / at once.

Having a place means that you know what a place means ... what it means in a storied sense of myth, character and presence but also in an ecological sense ... Integrating native consciousness with mythic consciousness

Around Jack (Kerouac) there circulated a palpable aura of fame and death.

In the belly of the furnace of creativity is a sexual fire; the flames twine about each other in fear and delight. The same sort of coiling, at a cooler, slower pace, is what the life of this planet looks like. The enormous spirals of typhoons, the twists and turns of mountain ranges and gorges, the waves and the deep ocean currents - a dragonlike writhing.

The other side of the "sacred" is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.

What use, Milton, a silly story
Of our lost general parents,
eaters of fruit?

The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us.

The size of the place that one becomes
a member of is limited only by
the size of one's heart.

Not long ago the forests were our depth, a sun-dappled underworld, an inexhaustible timeless source. Now they are vanishing.

With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free.

The Government finally decided
To wage the war all-out. Defeat
is Un-American.
And they took to the air,
Their women beside them
in bouffant hairdos
putting nail-polish on the
gunship cannon-buttons.
And they never came down
for they found,
the ground
is Pro-Communist. And dirty.
And the insects side with the Viet Cong.

A community needs it's elders to continue. Just as you could not grow culture out of a population of kindergarten children, a forest cannot realize its own natural potential without the seed-reservoirs, root-fungus threads, birdcalls and magical deposits of tiny feces that are the gift from the old to the young. Chris Maser says, "We need ancient forests for the survival of ancient forests.

Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.

To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture

I could almost love you again.

I have a friend who feels sometimes that the world is hostile to human life
he says it chills us and kills us. But how could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions
gravity and a livable temperature range between freezing and boiling
have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place" (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature's stricter lessons with some grace.

When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.

My Grandmother standing wordless fifteen minutes Between rows of loganberries, clippers poised in her hand.

I wanted a good place to settle:
Cold Mountain would be safe.
Light wind in a hidden pine -
Listen close - the sound gets better.
Under it a gray haired man
Mumbles along reading Huang and Lao.
For ten years I havn't gone back home
I've even forgotten the way by which I came.

How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

If, after obtaining Buddhahood, anyone in my land
gets tossed in jail on a vagrancy rap, may I
not attain highest perfect enlightenment.

Clouds sink down the hills Coffee is hot again. The dog Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.

What You Should Know to be a Poet"

all you can know about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
the names of stars and the movements of planets
and the moon.
your own six senses, with a watchful elegant mind.
at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

dreams.
the illusory demons and the illusory shining gods.
kiss the ass of the devil and eat sh*t;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
and maidens perfum'd and golden-

& then love the human: wives husbands and friends
children's games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.

work long, dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and lived with and finally lovd. exhaustion,
hunger, rest.

the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, entasy

real danger. gambles and the edge of death.

Zen aims at freedom but its practice is disciplined.

Burning the small dead branches broke from beneath thick spreading whitebark pine. A hundred summers snowmelt rock and air hiss in a twisted bough.

Thought is just an apprehension of touch.

I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.

Read carefully, then don't read; work hard, then forget about it; know your tradition, then liberate yourself from it; learn language, then free yourself from it. Finally, know at least one form of magic.

Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon swimming upstream with us, as we stroll a city street.

Doom scenarios, even though they might be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step ... is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world.

Knowing where and who are intimately linked.

A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one's own consciousness. The planet is a wild place and will always be.

Bearing in his right paw the shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances, cut the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war; His left paw in the Mudra of Comradely Display - indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma ...

Revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exploited masses: animals, trees, water, air, grasses

The tribes were Berkeley, North Beach, Big Sur, Marin County, Los Angeles, and the host, Haight-Ashbury.

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

But the poem was born elsewhere, and need not stay. Like the wild geese of the Arctic it heads home, far above the borders, where most things cannot cross.

Today we are aware as never before of the plurality of human life-styles and possibilities, while at the same time being tied, like in an old silent movie, to a runaway locomotive rushing headlong toward a very singular catastrophe

Being the Stream
Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the
stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream,
so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies.
Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally
into it.

I thought I heard an axe chop in the woods
It broke the dream; and woke up dreaming on a train.
It must have been a thousand years ago
In some old mountain sawmill of Japan.
A horde of excess poets and unwed girls
And I that night prowled Tokyo like a bear
Tracking the human future
Of intelligence and despair.

I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.

Deer love mushrooms.

When men see Han-shan
They all say he's crazy
And not much to look at -
Dressed in rags and hides.
They don't get what I say
And I don't talk their language.
All I can say to those I meet:
Try and make it to Cold Mountain.

The traditional harmlessness and refusal to take life in
any form has nation-shaking implications. The practice of meditation, for which one needs only "the ground beneath one's feet," wipes out mountains of junk being pumped into the mind by the mass media and supermarket universities.