Student Question
What is Thomas C. Wolfe's famous quote about going home again in "Look Homeward, Angel"?
Quick answer:
Thomas Wolfe's famous quote about going home again is "You can't go home again." This phrase, explored in his novel, signifies that returning to one's past is impossible due to the inevitable changes in people and places. It reflects the idea that both the individual and their former home have transformed, making it impossible to return to the same experience.
You Can't Go Home Again is the name of a novel by Thomas Wolfe. This has always reminded me of a saying from Heraclitus: "It is impossible to step into the same river twice." When you step into a river the second time, it is not the same river. The water is different, the current is different, and the earth below the river is different because a river is always in flux. This is a metaphor for life because when we return to a place or a person, things have changed. Going home again represents the same sense of change. You have changed, and so has home, so it is an impossiblility to return to the place you left. Similarly, the people at home have changed, and so, as you return, you are not returning to the same people. Some people feel this is rather sad, but if this were not true,...
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if we never changed, we would never grow, either!
...And at the end of it [self-appraisal] he knew, and with the knowledge came the definite sense of new direction toward which he had long been groping, that the dark ancestral cae, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back--but that you can't go home again.
The phrase had many implications for him. You can't go back to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of "the artist" and the ideal....(Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again")
This quote starts on page 706 of a hard-covered edition. Here is another quote from an google publication of Wolfe's novel, page 664:
He saw now that you can't go home again--not ever. There was no road back. Ended for him, with the sharp and clean finality of the closing of a door, was the time of his dark roots, like those of a pot-bound plant, could not be left to feed upon their own substance and nourish their own little self-absorbed designs. Henceforth, they must be spread outward--away from the hidden, secret, and unfathomed past that holds man's spirit prisoner--outward, outward toward the rich and life-giving soil of a new freedom in the wide world of all humanity. And there came to him a vision of man's true home, beyond the ominous and cloud-engulfed horizon of the here and now, in the green and hopeful and still-virgin meadows of the future. (664)
In one of his songs, Bob Seger sang,"I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." How often have people wished to return to an innoncence now lost! Wolfe's novel is truly inspiring as it urges its readers "beyond...the cloud-engulfed horizon of the here and now" in which so many are mired.