Andre Maurois Quotes

As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling ,and sewn with rebus threads.Most of the time , the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on .

... we are the products of our past. ... a web of complexities.

Everything we are is anchored in our childhoods. The drama comes in how we deal with it. Are we slaves to our past, or can we rise above it? This is the stuff of great stories.

My lifestyle is a consequence of my wounds. I'm the son of my history.

Clothes have memories, and sometimes you don't want to remember. People remember where they bought the clothes, who gave them, or where they stole them from.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom to all.

We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow.

The flesh of past lovers looks both familiar and strange.

Your past is your shadow. It has form but no substance, except in the places you allow it to touch you. (

The past can be a terrible weight bound to you by an unbreakable chain. You can drag it with you, forever looking over your shoulder at what holds you back. Or you can let it go and move forward. It’s your choice.

You are not free until your past has no effect on your future

That parasite: the past.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

The past stays on you the way powdered sugar stays on your fingers. Some people can get rid of it but it’s still there, the events and things that pushed you to where you are now.

A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past. One must look lengthwise backwards in the stream of time in order to see theself, or its shadow, now moving with the stream, now eddying in the currents from bank to bank of its channel, and now strenuously straining onwards in the pursuit of its chosen good.

The past is like the hair on our head. I moved to New York when I was twelve, but you always have this feeling that wherever you come from, you physically leave it, but it doesn't leave you.

A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

If you live in the past and allow the past to define who you are, then you never grow.

Why do we hold onto negativity? For some reason, we believe that others are affected by our experience of remaining upset, hurt or angry. Holding on to pain, anger, guilt or shame is the glue that binds us to the situation we want to escape.

It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.