Time does more than erode a riverbank or wear mountains down into tired hills. It takes the edge from our memories as well, overlaying everything with a soft focus so that it all blurs together. What really happened gets all jumbled up with the hopes and dreams we once had and what we wish had really happened.

In time and with water, everything changes

Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals, — all, all must be comprised in it; and oblivion of the past — how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life.

Alas! with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.

Time as a River, hath brought down to us what is more light and superficial; while things more solid and substantial have been immersed.

Time is a river, and books are boats.

Times had changed.
Sooner or later, they always did.

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.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

Time passed, slipping through the waist of the universe's great hourglass like the eroded soil of this continent slipping down her rivers to the seas.

Moons waxed and waned, the lilacs bloomed and died,
In the broad river ebbed and flowed the tide,
Ships went to sea, and ships came home from sea,
And the slow years sailed by and ceased to be.

Time flows away like the water in the river.

Time’s a river, Locke, and we’ve always drifted farther down it than we think.

The current of Time's river
Will carry off all human deeds
And sink into oblivion
All peoples, kingdoms and their kings. And if there's something that remains
Through sounds of horn and lyre,
It too will disappear into the maw of time
And not avoid the common pyre... [lines broken]

Just as the river where I step
is not the same, and is,
so I am as I am not.