The wild-often dismissed as savage and chaotic by “civilized” thinkers, is actually impartially, relentlessly, and beautifully formal and free. Its expression-the richness of plant and animal life on the globe including us, the rainstorms, windstorms, and calm spring mornings-is the real world, to which we belong.

— Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder Quotes

Deer love mushrooms.

— Gary Snyder

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

— Gary Snyder

Goal: Clean air, clean clear-running rivers, the presence of Pelican and Osprey and Gray Whale in our lives; salmon and trout in our streams; unmuddied language and good dreams.

— Gary Snyder

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.

— Gary Snyder

Each time you go that road it gets more straight.

— Gary Snyder

Though the nation is lost, the mountains and rivers remain” – Tu Fu.

— Gary Snyder

Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden.

— Gary Snyder

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.

— Gary Snyder

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.

— Gary Snyder

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.

— Gary Snyder

If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks.

— Gary Snyder

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.

— Gary Snyder

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

— Gary Snyder

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?

— Gary Snyder

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.

— Gary Snyder

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

— Gary Snyder

You must realize that these are abnormal times and there’s no way that any of us can keep ourselves pure.

— Gary Snyder

In the Western Hemisphere we have only the tiniest number of buildings that can be called temples or shrines. The temples of our hemisphere will be some of the planet’s remaining wilderness areas.

— Gary Snyder

There are paths that can be followed, and there is a path that cannot- it is not a path, it is the wilderness. There is a “going” but no goer, no destination, only the whole field.

— Gary Snyder

The truly experienced person, the refined person, delights in the ordinary.

— Gary Snyder
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