Gary Snyder Quotes

I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind.

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?

For several centuries Western civilization has had a drive for material accumulation, continual extensions of economic power, termed 'progress'...The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature.

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.

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance beween spirit and humility.

After weeks of watching the roof leak I fixed it tonight by moving a single board

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

O, ah! The awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion!

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

True affluence is to not need anything.

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

Streams and mountains never stay the same.

I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life, And dammit, that’s just what I’ve gone and done.

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.

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

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.

I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Like, when we did Parliament and Funkadelic and Bootsy, it was actually one thing. But there were so many people that you could split them up into different groups. And then, when we went out on tour and they [the record companies] would see us all up there together - we had five, six guitars playing at one time, not including the bass! -, they said: "Wait a minute, that's just one whole group, selling different names!" But it wasn't - we had enough people in the group that each member would have a section to be another group. So now we're finally starting to get them to understand that.

Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.

Human beings everywhere in the world are affected by the global media now. Still, what I have noticed in the east Asia, in the indigenous world, Alaska in particular, and in back country farm and ranch country, is a higher sense of etiquette, and more respectful manners. Urban middle class cosmopolitan world peoples of all races have become speedy and rude. This is a pretty big generalization though.

Wildness is not just the "preservation of the world," it is the world

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.

The best thing you can do for the planet is to stay home.

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

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

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.

As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks.

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

Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. In ecology we speak of "wild systems." When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive.