Thomas Lynch Quotations

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

It is not enough to be a corpse any more. Now, you have to be a politically correct corpse.

This is what it's like to be God.

It strikes me that after all the archbishops and politicos and true believers have their say on the ethics of the matter of euthanasia, bare fact sounds very compelling and very challenging.

It's not that I'm against Cox and the people who run Cox right now. We don't want to give that much authority to an unknown company, No. 1.

The instinct to preplan has been around for a long time.

... by doing you shall know What it is you have to do.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Whatever’s there to feel, feel it – the riddance, the relief, the fright and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache of your own mortality. Get with someone you can trust with tears, with anger, and wonderment and utter silence. Get that part done – the sooner the better. The only way around these things is through them.