Thomas Lynch Quotes & Sayings

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

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

There are those, too, who are ethnically predisposed in favor of funerals, who recognize among the black drapes and dirges an emotionally potent and spiritually stimulating intersection of the living and the dead. In death and its rituals, they see the leveled playing field so elusive in life. Whether we bury our dead in Wilbert Vaults, leave them in trees to be eaten by birds, burn them or beam them into space; whether choir or cantor, piper or jazz band, casket or coffin or winding sheet, ours is the species that keeps track of our dead and knows that we are always outnumbered by them. — Thomas Lynch

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

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

Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments... — Thomas Lynch

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

By doing you shall know What it is you have to do. — Thomas Lynch

Revision and prediction seem like wastes of time. As much as I'd like to have a handle on the past and future, the moment I live in is the one I have. Here is how the moment instructs me: clouds float in front of the moon's face, lights flicker in the carved heads of pumpkins, leaves rise in the wind at random, saints go nameless, love comforts, souls sing beyond the reach of bodies. — Thomas Lynch

When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort. But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams. — Thomas Lynch

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

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

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

Walking upright between the past and future, a tightrope walk across our times, became, for me, a way of living: trying to maintain a balance between the competing gravities of birth and death, hope and regret, sex and mortality, love and grief, all those opposites or nearly opposites that become, after a while, the rocks and hard places, synonymous forces between which we navigate, like salmon balanced in the current, damned some times if we do or don't. — Thomas Lynch

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

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

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

Once she even successfully argued on behalf of my older brother, Dan, getting a BBGun, a weapon which he promptly turned against his younger siblings, outfitting us in helmet and leather jacket and instructing us to run across Eaton Park while he practiced his marksmanship. Today he is a colonel in the army and the rest of us are gun-shy. — Thomas Lynch

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

It was there, in the parlors of the funeral home---my daily stations with the local lately dead---that the darkness would often give way to light. A fellow citizen outstretched in his casket, surrounded by floral tributes, waiting for the homages and obsequies, would speak to me in the silent code of the dead: "So, you think you're having a bad day?" The gloom would lift inexplicably. Here was one to whom the worst had happened, often in a variety of ways, and yet no word of complaint was heard from out the corpse. Nor did the world end, nor the sky fall, nor his or her people become blighted entirely. Life, it turns out, goes on with or without us. There is at least as much to be thankful for as wary of. — Thomas Lynch

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

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

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

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

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

The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor. — Thomas Lynch

God knows some days we all feel like losers. — Thomas Lynch

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

Still, I wasn't as certain as I tried to sound. And I wondered why it wasn't underputter - you know, for the one who puts them underground. Surely to take them seemed a bit excessive. I mean if they were dead. They wouldn't need the company on the way. Like you would take your sister to the drug store but you would put your bike in the garage. I loved the play of words and the meanings of them. — Thomas Lynch

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

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

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

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

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

The sad truths I've been taught by the families of the dead are these: seeing is believing; knowing is better than not knowing; to name the hurt returns a kind of comfort; the grief ignored will never go away. For those whose sons and daughters, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers and friends went off alive and never did return, the worst that can happen has already happened. The light and air of what is known, however difficult, is better than the dark. The facts of death, like the facts of life, are required learning. — Thomas Lynch

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. And if death is regarded as an embarrassment or an inconvenience, if the dead are regarded as a nuisance from whom we seek a hurried riddance, then life and the living are in for like treatment. — Thomas Lynch

I will, I do, Amen, Here Here, Let's
eat, drink and be merry. Marriage is
the public spectacle of private
parts:
cheque-books and genitals, house-wares, fainthearts,
all doubts becalmed by kissing
aunt, a priest's
safe homily, those tinkling glasses
tightening those ties that truly bind
us together forever, dressed to the nines.

Darling, I reckon maybe thirty years,
given our ages and expectancies.
Barring the tragic or untimely, say,
ten thousand mornings, ten thousand evenings,
please God, ten thousand moistened nights like this,
when, mindless of these vows, our opposites,
nonetheless, attract. Thus, love's subtactraction:
the timeless from the ordinary times --
nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. — Thomas Lynch

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

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