Richard Jackson Quotes & Sayings

Can you imagine a silence so desperate
to be heard? — Richard Jackson

Why is it we love so fully what has washed up on the beaches
of our hearts, those lost messages, lost friends, the daylight stars
we never get to see? Bad luck never takes a vacation, my friend
once wrote. It lies there among the broken shells and stones
we collect, a story he would say begins with you, with me,
a story that is forever lost among the backwaters of our lives,
our endless fear of ourselves, and our endless need for hope,
a story, perhaps an answer, a word suddenly on wing, the simple
sound of a torn heart, or the unmistakable scent of the morning's fading moon. — Richard Jackson

The memory of things become the reality of things.
Or maybe the past is not permanent. Maybe the tree has
said its fill, and leaves us with an image of ourselves. — Richard Jackson

I thought, then, that I could see your own soul in the constant
waves tearing unconcerned at the impenetrable dunes.
I wanted, then, to believe the moon is a flower,
fragrant, its stem tossed across the water. It was then
that I entered some other world, the way your life wakes
suddenly in the middle of the night to find your own
worn-out dreams lying in sheets around you... — Richard Jackson

Maybe I should just lie quietly inside you while our old selves slip in and out of the back rooms of the soul. — Richard Jackson

Light staggers through the trees.
Every moment is filled with other moments. — Richard Jackson

We will spend the rest of the day inventing a kind of love that no longer exists in the world, a kind of love no army can pillage at the outposts, no rumor could bring to its knees like a traitor. — Richard Jackson

The early bats are tying the air, the heart, into knots. They
fly on the wings of grief. The late butterfly follows them
over the edge of the cliff where the earth becomes the air
we turn into. It's called mirror vision when we see what isn't
here. The kind of faith that fails at unexpected moments
the way a climber reaches for a hold that will never

in his life, be there. It's called despair
when we open the door of a heart that no longer exists. — Richard Jackson

The thing is to sift out
the important sounds, little syllables and vowels that bring
hints of their lost words, and not to mistake the fossil for
the life, or the kiss for the love, not to mistake the fragment
for the sentence. — Richard Jackson

Young people think they know it all, but a lot of old salts around know they don't. — Richard Jackson

The heart sags. My footprints forget me.
I don't think anything will ever be the same.
This is the edge of the cliff and you can't move,
can't jump. Everything is vertical. With binoculars
you can see where you'll be in an hour. Raindrops
collect on the lens. A fine mist. It hides us.
It drifts into clocks. Gravity presses your hands.
Some hurts never get said. Some get smuggled. — Richard Jackson

One time, your heart almost slipped away on a river
barge. Your hands seemed to claw the sky. I'm sorry.
No one else made anything out of those streaked clouds.
The fact that it happened is proof enough for me. — Richard Jackson

Last night, the stars on the water were trap doors. The crows
with their charred wings are complaining to a hawk. It's time
to pack up the sunsets the dawns and move on. — Richard Jackson

There is no need for a fear of losing control over who is accessing the network to hold back the productivity benefits of flexible working. By examining their access strategy, businesses can implement practices that will keep data secure and control access what and from where. — Richard Jackson

I imagined a dark world
where the stars clamor to be inside us. Whatever we invent
becomes the history we have to live. In truth, it takes only
a handful of history's shadows to commandeer our dreams
It takes a famine of the heart to empty the streets of our words.
It takes an imaginary terror to rid ourselves of imagination. — Richard Jackson

Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart. — Richard Jackson

One third of all of our cancers are from tobacco. It's one of the big killers in America and more than half of our kids still have environmental tobacco smoke exposure when environmental tobacco smoke is known to be associated with sudden infant death syndrome, with ear infections, respiratory infections and the rest. If we had to pick something to really go after, that would be one that I would really argue is an extraordinarily high priority and something people can actually do something about. — Richard Jackson