Gary Snyder Quotes
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Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.
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O, ah! The awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion!
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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.
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When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.
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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.
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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.
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Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.
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Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.
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The Buddha taught that all life is suffering. We might also say that life, being both attractive and constantly dangerous, is intoxicating and ultimately toxic. 'Toxic' comes from toxicon, Pendell tells us, with a root meaning of 'a poisoned arrow.' All organic life is struck by the arrows of real and psychic poisons. This is understood by any true, that is to say, not self-deluding, spiritual path.
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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.
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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.
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Range after range of mountains. Year after year after year. I am still in love.
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Wildness is not just the "preservation of the world," it is the world
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The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.
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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.
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Clouds sink down the hills Coffee is hot again. The dog Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.
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The best thing you can do for the planet is to stay home.
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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.
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Thought is just an apprehension of touch.
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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
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Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.
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A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.
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My Grandmother standing wordless fifteen minutes Between rows of loganberries, clippers poised in her hand.
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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.
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A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe.
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I pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island, and to the beings who thereon dwell one ecosystem in diversity under the sun With joyful interpenetratio n for all.
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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.
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True affluence is to not need anything.
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The other side of the "sacred" is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.
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If, after obtaining Buddhahood, anyone in my land gets tossed in jail on a vagrancy rap, may I not attain highest perfect enlightenment.
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