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Better, the perfect, easy discipline of the swallows dip and swoop, without east or west.

— Gary Snyder

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Source: On open form poetry in "Some Yips & Barks in the Dark" in Naked Poetry : Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (1976) edited by Stephen Berg
Source quality: Source identified Names the work or year, but without an exact location.

More by Gary Snyder

Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion.

Buddhism and the Coming Revolution (1961)

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More quotes by Gary Snyder

If, after obtaining Buddhahood, anyone in my land
gets tossed in jail on a vagrancy rap, may I
not attain highest perfect enlightenment.

The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear.

Buddhist Anarchism (1961)

The Bodhisattva lives by the sufferer’s standard, and he must be effective in aiding those who suffer.

Buddhism and the Coming Revolution (1961)

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.

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.

Buddhism and the Coming Revolution (1961)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gary Snyder (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.