What does the saying, "You can't go home again" mean?

From my immediate experience, yes it is true. I just moved. Going back to the old place to clean up after all of our stuff was moved out, it looked strange to me in a way. It no longer felt like home.

Even if you were to move back to North Carolina after moving away, North Carolina would have moved on in the interim. It would look and feel different.

I think it means that home is a place in our memories.

To me, the saying, “You can’t go home again,” means things aren’t the same as when you were a child living at home. You see things through different eyes, so to speak, when you are away looking back. When you leave home to venture into the adult world and live on your own, you have a new perspective on life. You look at your old hometown or your parents’ house differently. (The phrase is the title of a novel by Thomas Wolfe.)

To me it would mean the wife spotted lipstick on my shirt collar…..& it’s not her’s!! Yeah, i’ll get my coat.

I think it is a state of disillusionment when you return to your place of upbringing.

However, I still can go home then. When I visit my parents, I still have that home feeling of being a kid. They are in the same house that I came home to at birth. I think I still get that feeling because the sense and feeling of family allows it to continue.
For me it is not about being grown and looking at things differently. In fact it is opposite. I am allowed to look at many things through different eyes, but once I pull into my parents driveway, I am home again. It is a great comforting feeling and to this day one of the biggest simple comforts. There always was and still is warmth and laughter and fun.

I never really thought of that phrase as having much to do with actual location, just with loss of a certain kind of innocence, I suppose.

@blueiiznh What a gift that you have that feeling!

I think that the saying has the connotations that @bkcunningham and @marinelife indicate. Like any saying (or book title), it has elements of truth to it but it does not mean that it will be true for you. It would behoove you, however, to keep in mind that things are not likely to be exactly as you pictured they would be when you do move.

I remember going to Italy for ten days on vacation, That country is huge with many people. On our eleventh day and ready to depart back to Nashville, I mentally absorbed all the sights, sounds and smells of Italy. I knew I would never be coming back.

Arriving back home, my city seemed so small, comparing it to Italy. It took me about ten more days for my lifestyle to sink in and the memories of Italy to be stored away in my mind.

A really good definition is like chapters in a book. The first chapter is your hometown. As you read more and more chapters of the book, you begin to realize the meaning of this book is changing, chapter after chapter. You go back and read chaper one again and it seems to have been a different set of words, than what you first remember reading.

I would expand the definition to mean trying to repeat any experience, not just the ones from my childhood.

I wouldn’t try to replicate anything from yesterday or last week.

@gailcalled Not even supper?

“You can’t step in the same river twice” has a somewhat similar meaning.

@janbb: Given last night’s supper, no thank-you.

It means that places change—both in the real world and inside your memory. If you go back after a long time, you may barely even recognize it.

This is especially important when people are expecting things to be a certain way when they go there. They will inevitably be disappointed. The place they expect doesn’t exist any more. Thus, there’s no way to go home.

I think Wundyatta nailed it right above me. And it’s more than just childhood memories. It’s anywhere or anything you once felt connected to, but have since moved on from.

For example, I spent 4 years at college at Indiana University, and it was an amazing experience for me. I felt so connected to the community and the physical sense of being while at school. (It’s a beautiful woodlands campus with gorgeous 100+ year old buildings.) A few years after I graduated, I went back to visit and it just wasn’t the same. 20 years later, I wouldn’t at all feel “home again” when visiting. It’s just not the same.

The phrase is taken from the title of a novel by Thomas Wolfe. Here’s how Wikipedia explains it:

“The title comes from the finale of the novel when protagonist George Webber realizes, “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood… back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame… back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

“You can’t go home again” has entered American speech to mean that after you have left your country town or provincial backwater city for a sophisticated metropolis, you can’t return to the narrow confines of your previous way of life, and, more generally, attempts to relive youthful memories will always fail.”

I don’t know if it’s always true, but the idea contains great wisdom about the human condition in a social context.

I would say it’s true. It really infers change. Everything changes. I’ve tried to go home. It’s there, but it’s not home anymore.

Home, as you knew it, is not there any more for you.

Returning to a town to drive by a house you lived happily in as a child is one way to really experience this.

How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm after They’e Seen Paree?

It means you can never recapture all of the feelings you had back “home.” You may feel a sense of “ownership” of your childhood house that won’t ever go away; you may feel nostalgic seeing the street sign echoing the name of the street; you may feel strangely at home again standing in the downtown square. I did this. I went back to my childhood home thirty five years later! I knocked on the door of my best friend I grew up with and went upstairs to her room. I walked around the block with her. I stood downtown waiting for a store to open. I spoke to the man who stood on “my” front step where I used to sit and color in coloring books. He was guarding the door, making sure I didn’t get any ideas of going inside to see my old room upstairs. He remembered me.
It was all too brief to analyze just how much at home I felt. But in front of my friend’s house was a huge , old maple tree that was there when we rode bikes as kids up and down that street. Know what I did? I put my hand on that tree but wanted to hug it. I’ve never felt like that before. My dream is to someday go back there and get inside my house. Not that it’s elegant or anything; it’s just full of memories and darn it; I want to go inside. Anyway, I cannot ever go home again, not really, because I can’t sleep in the house and awaken to mom’s cooking or go downstairs and see my gifts from Santa under the tree. But I’d love to get as close to doing all that as I can. How that can be done I just don’t know.

@anartist How ya gonna keep em down on the farm after they’ve seen Karl Hungus?