Thomas Lynch Quotes

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.

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.

Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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