Thomas Lynch quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.