Quoting from Thomas Lynch

On toilets

"The thing about the new toilet is that it removes the evidence in such a hurry. The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has civilized us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish."



On the death of a child when a gravestone was pushed off an overpass and into the vehicle she was in.

"A: It was the Hand of God. God woke up one Friday the 13th and said, "I want Stephanie!"

B: It wasn't the Hand of God. God knew it, got word of it..but didn't lift a hand because he knows how much we've come to count on the Laws of Nature--gravity and object in motion and at rest--so he doesn't fiddle with the random or deliberate outcomes."

Or C: The Devil did it. If faith supports the existence of Goodness, then it supports the probability of evil.

OR D: None of the above. Shit happens. That's Life, get over it, get on with it.

Or maybe E: All of the above. Mysteries--like decades of the rosary--glorious and sorrowful mysteries."

On poetry and women

"But if women in their twenties will trade favor for poems and warm to the easy duty of the muses, by thirty they grow wary and by forty regard it as an invasion of privacy and politically incorrect. They won't be muses. They've their own version of the story. But she was twenty then."

On Language

"Some days I'm sure of God, some day's I'm not. Most days I side with the French oddsmaker, Blaise Pascal...And of all God's gifts, the best one is language--the power to name and proclaim and identify, to fashion from the noisy void our lexicon for birds of the air..for contempt and affection, pleasure and pain, beauty and order and their absences."

Thomas A Kempis

"Write, read, sing, sigh, keep silence, pray, bear thy crosses manfully; eternal life is worthy of all these, and greater combats."

Lynch on death...he's an undertaker

"There seems to be, in my lifetime, an inverse relationship between the size of the TV screen and the space we allow for the dead in our lives and landscapes. With the pyramids representing one end of the continuum, and the memorial pendant...representing the other."

On, you know, death:

"But this other impulse--to memorialize, to commemorate, to record has a more subtle motive...We need our witness and archivist to say we lived, we died, we made this difference. Where death means nothing, life is meaningless...The cairns and stone piles, the life stories drawn on cave walls, the monuments and graveyards, one and all, are the traces left of the species before us--a space they've staked out in granite and bronze...We visit them. We trace the shapes of their names and dates with our fingers. We say the little epitaphs out loud." The dead always outnumber the living. "We try to reassemble their lives from the stingy details, and the exercise teaches us something about how to live."