Eric Cantona Quotes

I never get hung up on the past - the memories are too negative.

I believe that all the important people in my life prior to 1982 were victimized by my illness.

Sometimes my past is extraordinarily heavy. That's when I scream and cry until I feel like I can breathe again.

We all have something in our past that is gripping us, and 'Violet' is very much about leaving those things behind.

I refuse to let the past find me here.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

I suppose we all have our recollections of our earlier holidays, all bristling with horror.

I could never have a mistress, because I couldn't bear to tell the story of my life all over again.

You instinctively know that nothing will ever be the same, and you have to carry that knowledge around with you like a huge weight. The next time you see your girl, you can’t look her straight in the eyes the same way you did for all those years.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

You just can't win. Men have very recent land mines in their heads. Women have recorded conversations and photographs in their heads from 15 years ago.

Oh! The good times when we were so unhappy.

Maybe your history just repeats and repeats until it batters you enough to snap the seams that hold you together

That's another thing about Noise. Everything that's ever happened to you just keeps right on talking, for ever and ever.

Each day the memories weigh a little heavier. Each day they drag you down that bit further. You wind them around you, a single thread at a time, and you weave your own shroud, you build a cocoon, and in it madness grows.

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.

You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry, show people, put back in its black velvet pouch and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.

Life's accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up.

Grief and guilt. A powerful combination. Guilt like a liquid, a thin liquor, seeping everywhere, informing everything, saturating the whole-corrosive, like seawater, scented with the rich stench of ordure and corruption, and carrying with it hard, abrasive shards of grief.

Leaders who carry unresolved guilt are forced to hide a part of themselves from those to whom they are closest. They have a secret. They are forced to expend time and energy to ensure that no one finds them out. They know they are not completely trustworthy. Often they assume no one else is either. Guilty leaders have a difficult time trusting. Consequently, guilty leaders have a difficult time building teams.

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.

I nursed a worthless, pint drinker for twelve years and when my lazy, life-sucking, daddy finally died, I swore to God with tears in my eyes I'd never marry one. And then I did.

But I don't know what to him about the aftermath of killing a person. About how they never leave you.

I promise you, anybody given the choice of that kind of money or having to make a phone call to tell your dad that something like that has happened, it’s not worth it.

We can carry the burden of hurt throughout our lives. We can make the hurt that we have experienced the defining aspect of our stories of ourselves. That means that somebody else gets to say who we are, somebody else gets to decide how we feel, and somebody else gets to decide how we see the world. Forgiveness not only frees us from the burden of someone else's opinion of us, but it allows us the opportunity to really write a story of ourselves that we can love, enjoy, relish, and live into.