Quotes & Sayings About River Flows

She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.
She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here. — Neil Gaiman

The river flows at its own sweet will, but the flood is bound in the two banks. If it were not thus bound, its freedom would be wasted. — Vinoba Bhave

Spirit is Life. It flows thru the death of me endlessly like a river unafraid of becoming the sea. — Gregory Corso

I receive your love and I give you mine. Not the love of a man for a woman, not the love of a father for a child, not the love of God for his creatures. But a love with no name and no explanation like a river that cannot explain why it follows a particular course, but simply flows onwards. A love that asks for nothing and gives nothing in return; it is simply there. I will never be yours and you will never be mine; nevertheless, I can honestly say: I love you — Paulo Coelho

Yes Siddhartha,' he said. 'Is this what you mean: that the river is in all places at once, at its source and where it flows into the sea, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the ocean, in the mountains, everywhere at once, so for the river there is only the present moment and not the shadow of the future?'
'It is,' Siddhartha said.'And once I learned this I considered my life, and it too was a river, and the boy Siddhartha was separated from the man Siddhartha and the graybeard Siddhartha only by shadows, not by real things ... Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has being and presence. — Hermann Hesse

Let your rest be perfect in its season, like the rest of waters that are still. If you will have a model or your living, take neither the stars, for they fly without ceasing, nor the ocean that ebbs and flows, nor the river that cannot stay, but rather let your life be like that of the summer air, which has times of noble energy and times of perfect peace. It fills the sails of ships upon the sea, and the miller thanks it on the breezy uplands; it works generously for the health and wealth of all men, yet it claims it hours of rest.. I have pushed the fleet, I have turned the mill, I have refreshed the city, and now though the captain may walk impatiently on the quarter-deck, and the miller swear, and the city stink, I will stir no more until it pleases me. — Philip Gilbert Hamerton

And we have the night ahead of us
to stroll in lilac-scented gardens. Everything there
is here. It is all ours. You are mine, I am yours
and the shadow, your shadow, laughs like an orange. The dream
did its job and, like a postman, hurried on
to someone else. So we have to be
worthy, this evening, of ourselves, and of a river
that runs along beside us, and that we flow into as it flows into us. — Mahmoud Darwish

Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy. — Edward Abbey

In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God. — John Of The Cross

Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water). — Chuck Klosterman

A river goes wherever the riverbank does. It never had to ask which way, but only flows along. Yes? — Gavriel Savit

There's an unseen river of communication that forever flows - dark and powerful. Tonight was about food and laughter, yes. But it was also about navigatin' that river." A — Sharon M. Draper

Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man's ken now are but poor-mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and clich?-shouting publicity agents. Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance, ignorance bringing them nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God. — Sean O'Casey

This is the river. Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself. — Nan Shepherd

Remember, we non-Aboriginals were signatories. As a non-Aboriginal, I say we. And through Canada's signatures we committed ourselves to the permanency of our relationship with the words that these treaties would stand "as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the river flows." These were and remain binding legal documents. Perhaps more important, with our signatures we committed our government to act always with the Honour of the Crown. — John Ralston Saul

A writer is a river. Everything flows and changes and we're never the same person as the one who wrote yesterday's story. — Aleksandr Voinov

Absorbed in this world, you've made it your burden. Rise above this world. There is another vision. All your life you've paid attention to your experiences, but never to your Self. Are you searching for your Soul? Then come out of your prision. Leave the stream and join the river that flows into the Ocean. It will not lead you astray. Let the beauty you seek be what you do. — Rumi

There's a river somewhere that flows through the lives of everyone. — Roberta Flack

By the river on its bank, on one side and on the other, will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither and their fruit will not fail. They will bear every month because their water flows from the sanctuary, and their fruit will be for food and their leaves for healing." Ezekiel 47:12 — Erica McNeal

Beneath the current of our existence and within it, there is another current flowing in the opposite direction. In this life we go from yesterday to tomorrow, but there we go from tomorrow to yesterday. The web of life is being woven and unraveled at the same time. And from time to time we get breaths and vapors and even mysterious murmurs from that other world, from that interior of our own world. The inner heart of history is a counter-history; it is a process which inverts the course of history. The subterranean river flows from the sea and back to its source. — Miguel De Unamuno

There is an unseen river of communication that forever flows
dark and powerful. — Sharon M. Draper

The more we study mind and matter scientifically the more we see that all things follow a natural sequence, a sequence as liable to work for our disadvantage as for our advantage. It flows like the water of a river, it falls like rain, it is as impartial as the sea. It is as innocent of malice as it is of compassion. — Llewelyn Powys

Though it is 2500 feet high, the glacier flowed over its ground as a river flows over a boulder; and since it emerged from the icy sea as from a sepulcher it has been sorely beaten with storms; but from all those deadly, crushing, bitter experiences comes this delicate life and beauty, to teach us that what we in our faithless ignorance and fear call destruction is creation. — John Muir

23. Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone - those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the "what" is in constant flux, the "why" has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us - a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted. 24. — Marcus Aurelius

I am beginning to understand that the stream the scientists are studying is not just a little creek. It's a river of energy that moves across regions in great geographic cycles. Here, life and death are only different points on a continuum. The stream flows in a circle through time and space, turning death into life across coastal ecosystems, as it has for more than a million years. But such streams no longer flow in the places where most of us live. — Kathleen Moore

Time is a river, and it flows in a circle. I love you. — Jason Gurley

Poetry is such an amazing feeling that flows like a river. — Euginia Herlihy

She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course we had. She'd taken me back. — Richard Peck

My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying, gently rising, rising as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black putrid sea. Something bumped into me - something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living ... — H.P. Lovecraft

Are you searching for the river of your soul?
Then come out of your prison.
Leave the stream
and join the river
that flows into the ocean. — Rumi

Love is like some fresh spring, first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation. — Honore De Balzac

As long as some suffer
The River Flows Forever
As long as there is pain
The River Flows Forever
As strong as a smile can be
The River will Flow Forever — Tupac Shakur

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city ... Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds. — Charles Dickens

That's the way it is with the mind. Nothing is ever equal. Like a river, as it flows, the course changes with the terrain. — Haruki Murakami

Life is a waste of woes, And Death a river deep, That ever onward flows, Troubled, yet asleep. — William Batchelder Greene

The mind will say this forever. But I mostly fish rivers these dayas. In so doing, movement becomes stasis, flux is the constant, and everything flows around, through, and beyond me, escaping ungrasped, unnamed, and unscathed. The river's clean escape does not prevent belief in its reality. On the contrary, there is nothing I love more than the feel of a wholeness sliding toward, around, and past me while I stand like an idiot savant in its midst, focusing on tiny, idiot-savantic bits of what is so beautiful to me, and so close, yet so wondrously ungraspable. — David James Duncan

Love is not proud. Love does not boast. Love, after all, matters the most. Love does not run. Love does not hide. Love does not keep locked inside. Love is the river that flows through. Love never fails you. — Brandon Heath

The blues is a mighty long road. Or it could be a river, one that twists and turns and flows into a sea of limitless musical potential. — Billy Gibbons

The river flows to the sea, whatever the wind says about it — Naomi Novik

When I come to the country I cease to view man as separate from the rest. As the river runs through many a clime, so does the stream of men babble on, winding through woods and villages and towns. It is not a true contrast that men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever. Humanity, with all its confluent streams, big and small, flows on and on, just as does the river, from its source in birth to its sea in death- two dark mysteries at either end, and between them various play and work and chattering unceasing. — Rabindranath Tagore

The river seems to be holding itself up before you like a page opened to be read. There is no knowing how the currents move. They shift and boil and eddy. They are swifter in some places than in others. To think of 'a place' on the flowing surface soon baffles your mind, for the 'places' are ever changing and moving. The current in all its various motions and speeds flows along, and that flowing may be stirred again at the surface by the wind in all its various motions. Who can think of it? Maybe the ducks have mastered it, and the little grebes who are as much at home underneath as on top and who ride the currents for pleasure. — Wendell Berry

Time. What was time? Time is a river that flows both forward and backward. How could that be true? — Karen Essex

The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it-and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts' content. And we can even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently. — Kurt Vonnegut

The description of the New Jerusalem in chapters 21 and 22 is quite clear that some categories of people are "outside": the dogs, the fornicators, those who speak and make lies. But then, just when we have in our minds a picture of two nice, tidy categories, the insiders and the outsiders, we find that the river of the water of life flows out of the city; that growing on either bank is the tree of life, not a single tree but a great many; and that "the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." There is a great mystery here, and all our speaking about God's eventual future must make room for it. This is not at all to cast doubt on the reality of final judgment for those who have resolutely worshipped and served the idols that dehumanize us and deface God's world. It is to say that God is always the God of surprises. But — N. T. Wright

Imagine this opportunity as an amazingly attractive but fast-moving river. There is so much that looks extremely appealing about this river, you're going to be tempted to jump right in. But once you are in the river, you have diminished your ability to make decisions. That river is moving so fast that it will take you where it is going. And if you haven't carefully traced out in advance whether you want to go through and to the places that river flows, you'll be in trouble. — Lysa TerKeurst

Like a river flows surely to the sea/Darling so it goes/Some things are meant to be/Take my hand, take my whole life too/For I can't help falling in love with you. — Elvis Presley

A good story, you'd have said, is like our river Drina: never calm, it doesn't trickle along, it is rough and broad, tributaries flow in to enrich it, it rises above its banks, it bubbles and roars, here and there it flows into shallows but then it comes to rapids again, preludes to the depths where there's no splashing. But one thing neither the Drina nor the stories can do: there's no going back for any of them. The water can't turn back and choose another bed, just as promises now can't be kept. No drowned man comes up again asking for a towel, no love is found again, no tobacconist fails to be born in the first place, no bullet shoots out of a neck and back into the gun, the dam will hold or will not hold. The Drina has no delta. — Sasa Stanisic

In my mind the river flows both ways. Forward, to the explanation of things; to a destination which will justify the agonies of travel. And back, back to a time when the river was real, and those who wandered along its banks had little interest in visions. — Clive Barker

The Okavango Delta is an astonishing sight: the great Okavango River, rather than flow towards the sea, flows inland, into the sands of the Kalahari. — Alexander McCall Smith

Love is a choice. It's a decision.' She told us, 'It flows into, through, and out of each person like a river. If you try to stop it, it'll sneak around until It finds another heart and breaks through. — Charles Martin

The Son held up his hands. Luminescent, they seemed, as if dappled by autumn sun reflecting off a stream into shade. My grace flows from these as a river, wolf-lord. Would you have me dole it out in the exact measure that men earn, as from an apothecary's dropper? Would you stand in pure water to your waist, and administer it by the scant spoon to men dying of thirst on a parched shore? — Lois McMaster Bujold

You think you know all there is to know about here immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. — Neil Gaiman

When your heart flows broad and full like a river, a blessing and a danger to those living near: there is the origin of your virtue.
When you are above praise and blame, and your will wants to command all things, like a lover's will: there is the origin of your virtue.
When you despise the agreeable and the soft bed and cannot bed yourself far enough from the soft: there is the origin of your virtue.
When you will with a single will and you call this cessation of all need "necessity": there is the origin of your virtue.
Verily, a new good and evil is she. Verily, a new deep murmur and the voice of a new well!
Power is she, this new virtue; a dominant thought is she, and around her a wise soul: a golden sun, and around it the serpent of knowledge. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There is only one river. There is only one sea.
And it flows through you, and it flows through me.
There is only one people. We are one and the same.
We are all one spirit. We are all one name. — Peter Yarrow

Nothing is forever, but there's a continuing stream of people who go through our lives and continue with us ... Nothing just stops and stays ... But it flows on ... Like a river ... — Danielle Steel

Every river appears to consist of a main trunk, fed from a variety of branches, each running in a valley proportional to its size, and all of them together forming a system of vallies, communicating with one another, and having such a nice adjustment of their declivities that none of them join the principal valley on too high or too low a level; a circumstance which would be infinitely improbable if each of these vallies were not the work of the stream that flows in it. — John Playfair

You are the water that flows freely, the most dynamic force on the planet with the ability to change course and outlook at any time. You can be a raging river or a placid pond. A source of nourishment, or a breaker of walls. Part of an ocean or a solitary drop. You are dynamic, you are beauty, you are life. — Tom Althouse

One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way
said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man. — Leo Tolstoy

The stream of civilisation flows on like a river: it is rapid in mid- current, slow at the sides, and has its backwaters. At best, civilisation advances by spirals. — Sabine Baring-Gould

She's shed her skins
and plasma jeans, gets around in 2K
retro gear like the frock she wears today;
a loose, white elegy to what's been lost.
Already she's flowing back into herself
the way a river flows to fill a creek bed.
But some hard layer has washed away
and left her softer, more interested. — Lisa Jacobson

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone - those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river; the "what" is in constant flux, the "why" has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us - a chasm whose depths we cannot see. — Marcus Aurelius

You are beautiful. You are unique. Your heart holds celestial love which flows like a mighty river through you to nourish the universe. — Debasish Mridha

The present is the transition point between the past and future and flows like a river moving towards the ocean of one's life. One who lives in the present is neither burdened by the weight of the past nor troubled by foreseen events in the future. One who lives in the present is open to all experiences --the gentle sound of the wind rustling in the leaves, the blazing sight of the setting sun, the light touch of a spring rain, the fresh smell of green grass, the salty taste of ocean spray. The present is the past and future rolled into one. The present is here. The present is now. — Francis Fesmire

You know a dream is like a river
Ever changing as it flows.
And a dreamer's just a vessel
That must follow where it goes.
Trying to learn from what's behind you
And never knowing what's in store
Makes each day a constant battle
Just to stay between the shores. — Garth Brooks

Down through the middle of the Valley flows the crystal Merced, River of Mercy, peacefully quiet, reflecting lilies and trees and the onlooking rocks; things frail and fleeting and types of endurance meeting here and blending in countless forms, as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures, to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her. — John Muir

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Just as a river flows to the sea, growing older and slowing down are just part of the natural scenery, and I've got to accept it. It might not be a very natural process and what I discover as a result might not be all that pleasant. But what choice do I have, anyway? In my own way, I've enjoyed my life so far, even if I can't say I've fully enjoyed it. — Haruki Murakami

At the Biesbosch nature center, I met up with a water-ministry official named Eelke Turkstra. Turkstra runs a program called Ruimte voor de Rivier (Room for the River), and these days his job consists not in building dikes, but in dismantling them. He explained to me that the Dutch were already seeing more rainfall than they used to. Where once the water ministry had planned on peak flows in the Rhine of no more than fifteen thousand cubic meters per second, recently it had been forced to raise that to sixteen thousand cubic meters per second and was already anticipating having to deal with eighteen thousand cubic meters per second. Rising sea levels, meanwhile, were likely to further compound the problem by impeding the flow of the river to the ocean. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Stories are like a river that flows - you dip a bucket in it — Gary Paulsen

This ego business has come from various sources, you know that, but it has to be cleansed out. Like when the river flows all kinds of dirt, filth flows into it, but when it meets the sea it becomes the sea. In the same way you have to become that. To become the sea what you have to do is to forget all these tributaries which were coming into you, and all these wrong ideas which came to you. — Nirmala Srivastava

Between the banks of pleasure and pain flows the river of life. If you spend much time on either bank you will miss out on life. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice; it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne and flows by the path of obedience. — George Eliot

Time itself flows on with constant motion, just like a river: for no more than a river can the fleeting hour stand still. As wave is driven on by wave, and, itself pursued, pursues the one before, so the moments of time at once flee and follow, and are ever new. — Ovid

You have inherited (the) most from yourself, not from your family! The family is only a river through which Soul flows. — Edgar Cayce

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows. — Niall Williams

We like to put sacred texts in flowing waters, so I rolled it up, tied it to a piece of wood, placed a dandelion on top, and floated it in the stream which flows into the Swat River. Surely God would find it there. — Malala Yousafzai

I'm guessing this isn't the Mississippi," I said.
"The River of Night," Bloodstained Blade hummed. "It is every river and no river - the shadow of the Mississippi, the Nile, the Thames. It flows throughout the Duat, with many branches and tributaries."
"Clears that right up," I muttered. — Rick Riordan

Beyond the harm to local wildlife, any chemicals we used in our garden might end up polluting our well, or run off the property. In a heavy rainstorm, this runoff may end up in nearby Beaver Creek, a tributary to the Brandywine Creek, which runs into the Delaware River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean. These kinds of direct connections with the outside world exist in every garden, which is why I think we should always aim, in our gardening practices, to do the least harm and the greatest good. — David L. Culp

For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports. — Sandra Postel

The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,
flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time. — John Greenleaf Whittier

Even the early droplets of selfish decisions suggest a direction. Then the little inflecting rivulets come, merging into small brooks and soon into larger streams; finally one is swept along by a vast river which flows into the "gulf of misery and endless wo" (Hel. 5:12). — Neal A. Maxwell

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Reverie of Poor Susan
AT the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has pass'd by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the bird.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale
Down which she so often has tripp'd with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade;
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all pass'd away from her eyes! — William Wordsworth

I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding. — John O'Donohue

Close your eyes, Matt, and focus on third eye, the second chakra of your being. Open third eye and you will feel energy of other river as it flows. And energy of Goddess.
He closed his eyes. He could sense the energy of the woman next to him and the power of desire. He felt warmth and a sense of belonging here. But that was all. — Joe Niemczura

Time is like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. You can never go back. — Suzanne Woods Fisher

The love between people and especially between mothers and children doesn't end. It flows like a river through the world. Shut your eyes and you can feel it rising. — Eli Gottlieb

I am too weary.
For oh, I am so terribly weary at last! I think, in all of London, there is no-one and nothing so weary as I - unless perhaps the river, which flows beneath the frigid sky, through its accustomed courses, to the sea. How deep, how black, how thick the water seems to-night! How soft its surface seems to lie. How chill its depths must be. — Sarah Waters

In us, there is a river of feelings, in which every drop of water is a different feeling, and each feeling relies on all the others for its existence. To observe it, we just sit on the bank of the river and identify each feeling as it surfaces, flows by, and disappears. — Nhat Hanh

A dream is like a river ever changing as it flows and a dreamer's just a vessel that must follow where it goes. — Garth Brooks

There is no need of words. Our lives will do,
Long long enough to learn all of our love,
While time, the river, flows gently below,
Having no false eternities to prove.
The night is full of unspent tenderness
And in its silences we rest apart.
There is no need of words with which to bless
The daily bread, the wine of the full heart.
Here are the peaceful days we cannot share.
Here is our peace at last, and we not there. — May Sarton

A river is nearly the ultimate symbol for the very essence of change itself. It flows unceasingly from one point of being to another, yet continuously occupies the same bed or pathway, and accommodates life's endings with the same musical grace with which it accommodates life's beginnings, along with all the muted and explosive moments that surface between the two extremes. — Aberjhani

In the gun game, we are the most hunted. The river of blood that washes the streets of our nation flows mostly from the bodies of our black children, — Harry Belafonte

As you go down the water,' he said, 'you will find that the trees will fail, and you will come to a barren country. There the River flows in stony vales amid high moors, until at last after many leagues it comes to the tall island of the Tindrock, that we call Tol Brandir. There it casts its arms about the steep shores of the isle, and falls then with a great noise and smoke over the cataracts of Rauros down into the Nindalf, the Wetwang as it is called in your tongue. That is a wide region of sluggish fen where the stream becomes tortuous and much divided. There the Entwash flows in by many mouths from the Forest of Fangorn in the west. About that stream, on this side of the Great River, lies Rohan. On the further side are the bleak hills of the Emyn Muil. The wind blows from the East there, for they look out over the Dead Marshes and the Noman-lands to Cirith Gorgor and the black gates of Mordor. — J.R.R. Tolkien

The power of the river is to flow wildly! The power of the lake is to think calmly! Wise man both flows like a river and thinks like a lake! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Consciousness ... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'. — William James

Tan Chau lies on the Thanh Hoa canal, which sings with freedom as it flows into the Mekong River on its way to the sea. Only the wind and the water, which you cannot imprison, are truly free. — James D. Redwood

I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it. — David Brooks

Love, being in love, isn't a constant thing. It doesn't always flow at the same strength. It's not always like a river in flood. It's more like the sea. It has tides, it ebbs and flows. The thing is, when love is real, whether it's ebbing or flowing, it's always there, it never goes away. And that's the only proof you can have that it is real, and not just a crush or an infatuation or a passing fancy — Aidan Chambers

There's a stream that trickles through all of us. It's always there. It's evil and we know this, so we force it to mix with the larger river inside us. We let it be consumed by the greater flow of good. But when the good in the river runs dry and there isn't enough of it to dilute the stream, then the stream flows faster and harder, uncontrolled, and it finally floods one life, then another, then another. And it's always the innocent who are easiest to pull down. It's always the innocent who are standing there on the banks and looking in, curious and trusting and sometimes, maybe, even a little brave. — T. Jefferson Parker