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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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Gary Snyder
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: May 8
Environmentalist
Poet
Trade Unionist
Translator
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Gary Snyder
Different
Kinds
Writing
Tradition
Kind
Poetry
Builder
Like
Read
Wood
People
Use
Wanting
Write
Woods
Running
Findings
Anything
Finding

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.
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The best thing you can do for the planet is to stay home.
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Thought is just an apprehension of touch.
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All that we did was human, stupid, easily forgiven, Not quite right.
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Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.
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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.
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stay together learn the flowers go light
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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
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After weeks of watching the roof leak I fixed it tonight by moving a single board
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A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe.
Gary Snyder
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Clouds sink down the hills Coffee is hot again. The dog Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.
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.
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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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The other side of the sacred is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.
Gary Snyder
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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
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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.
Gary Snyder
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Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged?
Gary Snyder
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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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Knowing where and who are intimately linked.
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