Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

that we may see ourselves more accurately on this continent of watersheds and life-communities—plant zones, physiographic provinces, culture areas; following natural boundaries. The "U.S.A." and its states and counties are arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here.

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.

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

In the glittering light I got drunk and reeled through the rooms, And cried, "Cartagena! swamp of unholy loves!" And wept for the Indian whores who were younger than me, and I was eighteen, And splashed after the crew down the streets wearing sandals bought at a stall And got back to the ship, dawn came, we were far out at sea.

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

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.

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.

Each time you go that road it gets more straight.

Though the nation is lost, the mountains and rivers remain - Tu Fu

Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden.

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.

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.

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.

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

What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.

The moon shines on the river, The wind blows through the pines- Who is this long, beautiful evening for