Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in

Time flows away like the water in the river.

When I stand by the stream and watch it, I am relatively still, and the flowing water makes a path across my memory so that I realize its transience in comparison with my stability. This is, of course, an illusion in the sense that I, too, am in flow and likewise have no final destination — for can anyone imagine finality as a form of life? My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water.

The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.

Life, if well spent, is long.

that which is eternal within the moment only becomes shallow if spread out in time.

Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed.

Poets talk about “spots of time,” but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes: so with time present.

Time...which is eternity in disguise.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

Time is but memory in the making.

For in the popular way of thinking, history draws a time “line,” as if time marched in lockstep in only one direction. Some people say that time is a river into which we can step but once, as it flows in a straight path to the sea. But Nanabozho’s people know time as a circle. Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself — its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again.

Ever drifting down the stream
Lingering in the golden gleam
Life, what is it but a dream?

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.