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I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Gary Snyder

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Gary Snyder
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: May 8
Environmentalist
Poet
Trade Unionist
Translator
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Gary Snyder
Times
Unbalance
History
Poems
True
Wilderness
May
Measure
Trying
Ignorance
Mind
Hold
Things
Stand

More quotes by Gary Snyder

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A great poet does not express his or her self he expresses all of our selves.
Gary Snyder
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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
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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.
Gary Snyder
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My Grandmother standing wordless fifteen minutes Between rows of loganberries, clippers poised in her hand.
Gary Snyder
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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
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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.
Gary Snyder
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When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.
Gary Snyder
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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.
Gary Snyder
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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
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O, ah! The awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion!
Gary Snyder
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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
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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
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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.
Gary Snyder
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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
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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
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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
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Revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exploited masses: animals, trees, water, air, grasses
Gary Snyder
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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
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After weeks of watching the roof leak I fixed it tonight by moving a single board
Gary Snyder
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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