Quotes from Gary Snyder

If we made such good use of animals, eating them, singing about them, drawing them, riding them, and dreaming about them, what do they get back from us?

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.

WE SHALL SEE WHO KNOWS HOW TO BE

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

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

There are two things that are really educational. One is being with a bunch of really smart people. The other is being all by yourself.

Don't imagine that we're doing ecological politics to save the world. We're doing ecological politics to save ourselves, to save our souls. It's a personal exercise in character and in manners. It's a matter of etiquette. It's a matter of living right. It's not that the planet requires us to be good to it. It's that we must do it because it's an aesthetic and ethical choice.

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

I don't think it would be apprpriate for a man to call himself a feminist.

If you have an understanding and cannot express it, then your understanding is not yet complete.

We all receive, every day, the gifts of the Deep World, from the air we breathe to the food we eat

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.

It means using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest, pacifism, voluntary poverty and even gentle violence if it comes to a matter of restraining some impetuous redneck.

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.

There is no sight moves me more than the jagged Olympics floating above the islands and inlets of Puget Sound.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

Il galateo del mondo selvatico non richiede solo generosità ma una specie di rude e allegra capacità di tollerare i disagi con buon umore, di comprendere la fragilità di tutti e una certa umiltà.

Do not put too much faith in government

We can no longer think that the fate of humanity and that of the nonhuman world are independent of each other

Performance is currency in the deep world's gift economy