Thomas Lynch Quotes

#1. God knows some days we all feel like losers.

Thomas Lynch

#2. I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.

Thomas Lynch

#3. We deal with love by dealing with the ones we love, with sickness by dealing with the sick, and with death by dealing with the dead. And

Thomas Lynch

#4. Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

Thomas Lynch

#5. A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.

Thomas Lynch

#6. If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Thomas Lynch

#7. It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm's way, shield him from pain. What good are fathers if not for these things?

Thomas Lynch

#8. Watching my parents, I watched the meaning change, of what it was that undertakers do: From something done with the dead, to something done for the living, to something done by the living - everyone of us.

Thomas Lynch

#9. Wanting to be near my bread and butter business which was my hairstyling salon, I have done little touring during my lifetime. I hate all this moving around from hotel to hotel, packing and unpacking. I know many entertainers agree with me on this subject.

Thomas Lynch

#10. Sometimes I stand among the stones and wonder. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I weep. Sometimes nothing at all much happens. Life goes on. The dead are everywhere.

Thomas Lynch

#11. The girl who climbed up the water tower. We would have counted her an accident until the medical examiner found breaks and fractures from her hips to her heels. "You fall head first," he said. "Feet first's a jump.

Thomas Lynch

#12. So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

Thomas Lynch

#13. Wary of being caught unawares, we planned our parenthood, committed to trial marriages with pre-nuptials, and pre-arranged our parents' funerals - convinced we could pre-feel the feelings that we have heard attend new life, true love, and death.

Thomas Lynch

#14. Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments...

Thomas Lynch

#15. The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.

Thomas Lynch

#16. By doing you shall know What it is you have to do.

Thomas Lynch

#17. Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

Thomas Lynch

#18. The world's supply of heartache is secure. There's love and hate and mayhem everywhere.

Thomas Lynch

#19. Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid each other.

Thomas Lynch

#20. How much of what we do, from the ridiculous to the sublime, would not be done if we did not die? In tha blank face of mortality we always ask , "What's next?

Thomas Lynch

#21. But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

Thomas Lynch

#22. There's no easy way to do this. So do it right: weep, laugh, watch, pray, love, live, give thanks and praise; comfort, mend, honor, and remember.

Thomas Lynch

#23. I'm lazy but generally task oriented so having a hoop to jump through means eventually I'll make the effort.

Thomas Lynch

#24. I think maybe Gladstone had it right. I think my father did. They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions---only those who do it well and those who don't.

Thomas Lynch

#25. The advance of our technology is coincidental with the loss of our appetite for ethical questions that ought to attend the implications of these new powers. . . In the name of diversity, any idea is regarded as worthy as any other; any nonsense is entitled to a forum, a full hearing, and equal time.

Thomas Lynch

#26. The realization that God could be female required the consideration that the Devil could be also.

Thomas Lynch

#27. Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.

Thomas Lynch

#28. I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one.

Thomas Lynch