Browse quotations by Richard Jefferies with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Every publication-ready author-and-topic collection is linked here so the complete focused guide set remains directly discoverable from this author page.
“I think of the drift of time”
Seasonal change prompts Jefferies to experience time as movement visible in buds, flowers and remembered observation, linking temporal awareness to close attention to the natural world.
Field and Hedgerow, in the essay “Hours of Spring”; Project Gutenberg #7030. The book was collected posthumously by Jefferies’s widow, so individual essays may predate the 1889 volume.
“The gap of time since I had seen him last had made no impression on me”
Jefferies describes memory resisting elapsed time: the remembered person remains vivid even though years have passed and death has created an irreversible break in the present.
Field and Hedgerow; Project Gutenberg #7030. The sentence occurs in a recollection of John Brown after his death and is kept in that personal-memory context rather than generalized into abstract grief advice.
“The first stroll of the year should be taken in Claygate Lane.”
Jefferies treats the year as a sequence of observable natural opportunities, tying a particular walk to the first spring signs rather than treating seasonal time as an abstract calendar alone.
Nature Near London, “Woodlands”; Project Gutenberg #18629. The recommendation is literary nature writing rooted in Jefferies’s local seasonal observation, not contemporary travel guidance.
“as the spring began, came crowds of chiffchaffs and willow-wrens”
The arrival of birds marks spring through recurring natural events, showing how Jefferies reads time through seasonal change and attention rather than through dates alone.
Nature Near London, Preface, Project Gutenberg #18629. The represented witness reads 'First, as the spring began, came crowds of chiffchaffs and willow-wrens'; the frozen catalog excerpt begins with 'as the spring began' and therefore drops the introductory 'First,'. Jefferies is recording one local observational experience near London, explicitly warning later in the Preface that season, locality and weather vary; it is not a universal present-day phenology schedule.
“It is eternity now.”
Jefferies collapses ordinary chronological distinctions into an intensely experienced present, describing the current moment as participation in eternity rather than a point merely passing toward the future.
The Story of My Heart (1883), Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #2317. The inherited Chapter I note is corrected: ‘It is eternity now’ occurs in Jefferies’s tumulus meditation after he writes that, recognising his inner consciousness / psyche, he cannot understand time. It is speculative spiritual autobiography and metaphysical-poetic reflection, not a scientific theory of time, physics or consciousness.
“Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.”
The repeated ‘now’ intensifies Jefferies’s claim that spiritual significance is experienced in the present rather than postponed to a distant future or afterlife.
The Story of My Heart (1883), Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #2317. The inherited Chapter I note is corrected: ‘Now is eternity; now is the immortal life’ immediately follows the same tumulus passage in which Jefferies treats the present moment as continuous eternity. This is his personal metaphysical/spiritual intuition, not empirical evidence for immortality, neuroscience or clinical guidance.
