Gary Snyder Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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. — Gary Snyder

A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe. — Gary Snyder

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

Sometime in the last ten years the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment. This discovery has been forced on us by the realization that we are approaching the limits of something. — Gary Snyder

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

What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. It's not a strictly spiritual affair; it has psychological roles to fulfill. You might not want it to be a religion based on your own experience but that's like wanting to clean up your dreams — Gary Snyder

Ko Un's poems evoke the open creativity and fluidity of nature, and funny turns and twists of Mind. Mind is sometimes registered in Buddhist terms - Buddhist practice being part of Ko Un's background. Ko Un writes spare, short-line lyrics direct to the point, but often intricate in both wit and meaning. Ko Un has now traveled worldwide and is not only a major spokesman for all Korean culture, but a voice for Planet Earth Watershed as well. — Gary Snyder

stay together
learn the flowers
go light — Gary Snyder

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 — Gary Snyder

Here is perhaps the most delicious turn that comes out of thinking about politics from the standpoint of place: anyone of any race, language, religion, or origin is welcome, as long as they live well on the land. The great Central Valley region does not prefer English over Spanish or Japanese or Hmong. If it had any preferences at all, it might best like the languages it has heard for thousands of years, such as Maidu or Miwok, simply because it is used to them. Mythically speaking, it will welcome whomever chooses to observe the etiquette, express the gratitude, grasp the tools, and learn the songs that it takes to live there. — Gary Snyder

Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics — Gary Snyder

And our conservationist-environmentalist-moral outrage is often (in its frustration) aimed at the logger or the rancher, when the real power is in the hands of people who make unimaginably larger sums of money, people impeccably groomed, excellently educated at the best universities - male and female alike - eating fine foods and reading classy literature, while orchestrating the investment and legislation that ruin the world. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

Deer love mushrooms. — Gary Snyder

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

A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves. — Gary Snyder

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

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. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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

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. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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

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? — Gary Snyder

True affluence is to not need anything. — Gary Snyder

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

Streams and mountains never stay the same. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture — Gary Snyder

There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea. — Gary Snyder

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

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. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off. — Gary Snyder

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

Switchback"

turn, turn,
and again,
hard scrabble
steep travel
ahead. — Gary Snyder

Forests in the tropics are cut to make pasture to raise beef for the American market. Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant. — 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

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

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 ... — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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

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 — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

Each time you go that road it gets more straight. — Gary Snyder

the man who has the soul of the wolf
knows the self-restraint
of the wolf — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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

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. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

All too many people in power in the governments and universities of the world seem to carry a prejudice against the natural world -and also against the past, against history. It seems Americans would live by a Chamber-of-Commerce Creationism that declares itself satisfied with a divinely presented Shopping Mall. The integrity and character of our own ancestors is dismissed with "I couldn't live like that" by people who barely know how to live at all. An ancient forest is seen as a kind of overripe garbage, not unlike the embarrassing elderly. — Gary Snyder

gentle and innocent as wolves
as tricky as a prince — Gary Snyder

Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place. — Gary Snyder

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

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. — Gary Snyder

My love thoughts these days Come thick like the summer grass Which soon as cut and raked
Grows — Gary Snyder

Thought is just an apprehension of touch. — Gary Snyder

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

The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us. — 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

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

In Western Civilization, our elders are books. — Gary Snyder

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

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. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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

Zen aims at freedom but its practice is disciplined. — Gary Snyder

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 — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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 — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

I could almost love you again. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility. — Gary Snyder

I have lived at Cold Mountain
These thirty long years.
Yesterday I called on friends and family:
More than half had gone to the Yellow Springs.
Slowly consumed, like fire down a candle;
Forever flowing, like a passing river.
Now, morning, I face my lone shadow:
Suddenly my eyes are bleared with tears. — Gary Snyder

But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can feel truly at home. The sum of a field's forces [become] what we call very loosely the 'spirit of the place.' To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made or parts, each of which in a whole. You start with the part you are whole in. — Gary Snyder

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

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. — 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

Knowing where and who are intimately linked. — Gary Snyder

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

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. — Gary Snyder

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

Damn me not I make a better fool. And there is nothing vaster, more beautiful, remote, unthinking (eternal rose-red sunrise on the surf - great rectitude of rocks) than man, inhuman man,
At whom I look for a thousand light years from a seat near Scorpio, amazed and touched by his concern and pity for my plight, a simple star,
Then trading shapes again. My wife is gone, my girl is gone, my books are loaned, my clothes are worn, I gave away a car; and all that happened years ago. Mind & matter, love & space are frail as foam on beer. — Gary Snyder

True affluence is not needing anything. — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder

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

Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged? — Gary Snyder

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. — Gary Snyder