You Can't Go Home Again

American

noun

a novel (1940) by Thomas Wolfe.

You can't go home again Cultural

You can't recover the past. This saying is the title of a novel by the twentieth-century American author Thomas Wolfe.

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

They say you can’t go home again, but with a good map and a good crew you can get pretty close.

From Los Angeles Times

In the Guardian, Lucy Mangan is more measured in her three-star review, saying: "They've tried. You can feel it. They want to make it good for us... But, as Thomas Wolfe so rightly said, you can't go home again."

From BBC

At first glance, to say “You can’t go home again” seems absurd, for most of us go home every day, assuming we have left our houses in the first place.

From Literature

That is the moment when the words “You can’t go home again” toll their sad bell of truth.

From Literature

“Who says you can’t go home again?”

From Los Angeles Times

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023