you can't go home again

you can't go home again

You can't truly go back to a place you once lived because so much will have changed since you left that it is not the same place anymore. Jim is so excited to visit his childhood town—I hope he knows that you can't go home again. I had such a great time in college that I'm nervous to go back for my reunion, since you can never go home again.
See also: again, go, home
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • ditch (some place)
  • be driven, pushed, etc. from pillar to post
  • be pushed from pillar to post
  • defect to
  • defect to (something)
  • Mecca for
  • barrel in
  • barrel in(to)
  • come on into (some place)
  • come right in
References in periodicals archive
Perkins worked with Wolfe to revise his cumbersome first manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel (1929) for publication; Wolfe's next novel, Of Time and the River (1935), was dedicated to Perkins, but Wolfe took his third novel to a different publisher, and in You Can't Go Home Again (1940), introduced a character named Foxhall Edwards apparently modeled on Perkins.
"You're always told: You can't go home again," says McCormack, who juggled his return to the comedy with the Netflix Canadian time-travel drama, Travelers .
In a 3 May 1938 letter to Nowell, who was his agent, Wolfe said he also planned to use material from the Purdue speech for a kind of epilogue to his novel-in-progress--a portion that might be called "You Can't Go Home Again," or "A Farewell to the Fox," or perhaps something else (751).
WORCESTER -- "You can't go home again,'' or so said American author Thomas Wolfe in the title of one of his novels.
Thomas Wolfe wrote "you can't go home again" and in many ways Jason finds this true: romance and even landscapes have vastly changed, and McNabb brings these changes to life using descriptions steeped in observation: "...
Eventually, missing Balgarka, Dmitri makes a long-delayed trip back, only to discover that, in the end, you can't go home again.
It'll be preceded by a single, You Can't Go Home Again, on May 17.
In the book's last photograph, which takes a sudden detour to a Fina gas station not in Oklahoma but in Texas, Ruscha makes shrewd fun of the pointed tensions between old and new conceptions of art - Fina providing a cinematic, European art-house emblem denoting "The End," and Texas offering a plainspoken, all-American reassertion that, no, you can't go home again. So much for the reverential AbEx journey in search of existential origins.
Wolfe did not publish another novel during his lifetime, though at his death he left a prodigious quantity of manuscript, from which the editor Edward Aswell extracted two more novels, Web and the Rock, The (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940), and a collection of shorter pieces and chapters of an uncompleted novel, The Hills Beyond (1941).
Grange's story may contradict Thomas Wolfe's notion that you can't go home again, but Ruth's story emphasizes the fact that staying home or returning home for good can stifle certain kinds of people.
You Can't Go Home Again took me nine days, and then I read The Hills Beyond in seven days.
They say you can't go home again, but I hope that's not true for Bill Weld.
CHICAGO - They say you can't go home again, that the relentless march of time and inevitable distortions of memory ensure that efforts to rediscover the places of our youth invariably end in disappointment.
In his first feature, experienced documaker Amir Shahab Razavian turns a loving, amused eye on his three hoary protags who discover you can't go home again. Japanese co-production participation can be intuited in the scenic landscapes through which they travel, filling the screen with Iran's spectacular deserts, mountains and forests.
You Can't Go Home Again Novel by THOMAS WOLFE, published posthumously in 1940 after heavy editing by Edward Aswell.