Richard Jefferies Quotes

The birds never needed passports... We always thought, the birds can go wherever they want, and we couldn't, really. The birds were very much the symbol of... free movement for me.

I'm like the only Kiwi that can fly, I'm the one with the biggest wing.

For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.

People don't actually stay still, you know - when their area is a disaster, they go somewhere else, right? And that's just a natural human impulse.

When you have birds you stare at them a lot and their eyes are recessed on their head. When they look at something they tilt their head in a quizzical expression.

Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?

Without any formal orders to retreat, what was left of the several organizations yielded to a general impulse to abandon the field. Officers and men became controlled by the one thought of getting as far as possible from the enemy.

You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren.

I've always been fascinated by everything with wings.

I'm terrified of heights, but I think there's something really beautiful about birds and soaring, having a bird's-eye view of the world.

I would love to be more specific, but really, any type of bird is the funniest animal. They have to move awkwardly when walking. They have beady eyes; they are very suspicious. They can't do anything right. They have no hands, which is inherently funny.

Birds have wings; they're free; they can fly where they want when they want. They have the kind of mobility many people envy.

For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese.

Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling, and who hurries out to see a golden plover that's been reported in the neighbourhood, just because it's a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska.

If you sit down among hundreds of thousands of albatrosses in a field, pretty soon you'll be completely surrounded by them, as they come walking up toward us and nibble on our shoelaces and just look right at us out of curiosity.

Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig.

Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.

Fowls, by winter forced, forsake the floods, and wing their hasty flight to happier lands.

...as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.

Birds are flyin' south for winter. Here's the Weird-Bird headin' north, Wings a-flappin', beak a-chatterin', Cold head bobbin' back 'n' forth. He says, "It's not that I like ice Or freezin' winds and snowy ground. It's just sometimes it's kind of nice To be the only bird in town.

Birds always seem like they're swooping down on you.

I'm going to tell you the story about the geese which fly 5,000 miles from Canada to France.

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.

We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.

And to lose the chance to see frigatebirds soaring in circles above the storm, or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, or a myriad terns flashing in the bright light of midday as they hover in a shifting maze above the beach -- why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.