Gary Snyder Quotes

"If Ginsberg is the Beat movement's Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder is the Henry David Thoreau".-Bruce Cook

"I want to create wilderness out of empire."-Gary Snyder

"We . . . must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is."-Gary Snyder

"Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat - and the old, old habitat of humans - falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies."-Gary Snyder

"Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged?"-Gary Snyder

"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

"We are fouling our air and water and living in noise and filth that no "animal" would tolerate, while advertising and politicians try to tell us we've never had it so good."-Gary Snyder

"Sometime in the last twenty years the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment." -Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder at Kerouac Alley