You can't write it out, can you?

From The Murder Room by P.D. James.

She went on, "Neville thought we were too obsessed with the past - history, tradition, the things we collect. He said we clutter ourselves with dead lives, dead ideas, instead of coping with the problems of the present. But he was obsessed with his own past. You can't write it out, can you? It's over but it's still with us. It's the same whether it's a country or a person. It happened. It made us what we are, we have to understand it."