Quotes from book
You Can't Go Home Again

You Can't Go Home Again

Thomas Wolfe

This eBook edition of "You Can't Go Home Again" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. George Webber has written a successful novel about his family and hometown. When he returns to that town, he is shaken by the force of outrage and hatred that greets him. Family and lifelong friends feel naked and exposed by what they have seen in his books, and their fury drives him from his home. Outcast, George Webber begins a search for his own identity. It takes him to New York and a hectic social whirl; to Paris with an uninhibited group of expatriates; to Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler's shadow.

“I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

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“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

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“Toil on, son, and do not lose heart or hope. Let nothing you dismay. You are not utterly forsaken. I, too, am here--here in the darkness waiting, here attentive, here approving of your labor and your dream.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

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“It seems to me that in the orbit of our world you are the North Pole, I the South--so much in balance, in agreement--and yet… the whole world lies between.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

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“Peace fell upon her spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed her whole being. Life was so solid and splendid, and so good.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

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“To a future world,— inhabited, no doubt, by a less acute and understanding race of men, — all this may seem a trifle strange. If so, that will be because the world of the future will have forgotten what it was like to live in 1929.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book II, Ch. 14: Zero Hour
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“Now they saw it — its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength — and turned their shuddering eyes away. "Give us back our well-worn husk," they said, "where we were so snug and comfortable." And then they tried word magic. "Conditions are fundamentally sound," they said — by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed, that things were as they always had been, and as they always would be, forever and ever, amen. But they were wrong. They did not know that you can't go home again. America had come to the end of something and to the beginning of something else. But no one knew what that something else would be and out of the change and uncertainly and the wrongness of the leaders grew fear and desperation and before long hunger stalked the streets. Through it all there was still only one certainty, though no one saw it yet. America was still America, and whatever new thing came of it would be American.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book III: An End and a Beginning
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me — and I think for all of us — not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream. I think the life which we have fashioned in America, and which has fashioned us — the forms we made, the cells that grew, the honeycomb that was created — was self-destructive in its nature, and must be destroyed. I think these forms are dying, and must die, just as I know that America and the people in it are deathless, undiscovered, and immortal, and must live.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book VII, Ch. 48: Credo
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and now it seemed to George that there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station. For here, as nowhere else on earth, men were brought together for a moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys, here one saw their greetings and farewells, here, in a single instant, one got the entire picture of the human destiny. Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, all made small tickings in the sound of time--but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book I, Ch. 5: The Hidden Terror
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“I think the true discovery of America is before us. I think the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. And I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon. I think I speak for most men living when I say that our America is Here, is Now, and beckons on before us, and that this glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book VII, Ch. 48: Credo
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born yesterday, or that he grew to manhood forty years ago, or that he suffered sickness and collapse in 1929, or that we began without the enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the nature of the enemy is insatiate--tried finally to take from us the crust.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book VII, Ch. 48: Credo
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“His enemy was time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book III, Ch. 26: The Wounded Faun
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“To believe that new monsters will arise as vicious as the old, to believe that the great Pandora's Box of human frailty, once opened, will never show a diminution of its ugly swarm, is to help, by just that much, to make it so forever.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book VII, Ch. 47: Ecclesiasticus
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“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.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book VI, Ch. 44: The Way of No Return
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“So, then, to every man his chance—to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity—to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him — this, seeker, is the promise of America.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book IV, Ch. 31: The Promise of America
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“Go, seeker, if you will, throughout the land and you will find us burning in the night.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book IV, Ch. 31: The Promise of America
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox in America--that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, this is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book I, Ch. 5: The Hidden Terror
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“He who lets himself be whored by fashion will be whored by time.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book II, Ch. 21: Love is Not Enough
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

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