Word.ws English Dictionary

you can't go home again

you can't go home again proverb: past times which are fondly remembered are irrecoverably in the past and cannot be relived.

Proverb

you can't go home again

  1. Past times which are fondly remembered are irrecoverably in the past and cannot be relived.
    • The organizers of a surprisingly refreshing program called "Judson Dance Theater Reconstruction" know that you can't go home again. Instead, they have tried to re-create that home if ever so briefly—even if it was a home these same young organizers never knew.1982 April 18, Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance: Judson Theater Remembered”, in New York Times, retrieved 05 Nov 2018
    • As novelist Thomas Wolfe (1930s, not 1960s, version) declared in one of his book titles, You Can't Go Home Again—because home isn't there anymore.2001 June 24, George J. Church, “Jobs in an Age of Insecurity”, in Time, archived from the original on 07 Jul 2022

Origin of you can't go home again

From the novel You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938), published posthumously in 1940. Wolfe took the title from a conversation with the writer Ella Winter, who remarked to Wolfe: "Don't you know you can't go home again?" Wolfe then asked Winter for permission to use the phrase as the title of his book.

Questions about you can't go home again

What does you can't go home again mean?
You can't go home again means past times which are fondly remembered are irrecoverably in the past and cannot be relived.
What part of speech is you can't go home again?
You can't go home again is a proverb.

Words near you can't go home again in the dictionary

  1. you can't catch old birds with chaff
  2. you can't fight City Hall
  3. you can't fix stupid
  4. you can't get a quart into a pint pot
  5. you can't get something for nothing
  6. you can't go home again
  7. you can't judge a book by its cover
  8. you can't keep a good man down
  9. you can't live with 'em, you can't live without 'em
  10. you can't live with them, you can't live without them
  11. you can't make a silk purse of a sow's ear

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: you can't go home again (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “you can't go home again.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/you_can%27t_go_home_again. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.