150 Quotes by Gary Snyder

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.

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.

Though the nation is lost, the mountains and rivers remain” – Tu Fu.

Deer love mushrooms.

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.

In the 40,000 year time scale we’re all the same people. We’re all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.

Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden.

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.

Wildness is not just the “preservation of the world,” it is the world.