44 Quotes by 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.

The living have to live with it. You don’t. Theirs is the grief or the gladness of your death, theirs is the loss or gain of it. Theirs is the pain and the pleasure of memory.

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.

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.