Bill Bryson Quotes

You can't really go back to where you came from. I don't think any of us can.

I do not agree with Thomas Wolfe... about anything. You can go home again as long as you don't expect home to be what it was when you left it. Or you don't expect yourself to be what you were when you left home.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

I was in a bar and I said to a friend, 'You know, we've become those 40-year-old guys we used to look at and say, 'Isn't it sad?'

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.

It wouldn't be New Year's if I didn't have regrets.

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

When I was 18, I couldn't wait to move away. I was like: 'If I ever have to come back here, I'll kill myself.' Glasgow seemed like failure and death to me back then, but not any more.

I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

The best years are behind me.

When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.

If I've learned one thing in life, it's you can never go back.

I never imagined my life would be the way that it has been for the past 30 years. I have had the best experiences a person can have-and the worst as well.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.

There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

Moving is easy, exciting, an adventure - when you're young. Later, not so much. I love Massachusetts, my old home. Sometimes, late at night, I even study the real estate ads in my old hometown. But it's not even a fantasy. My parents are both gone. The world I left doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the person I was.

I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: 'Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.'

Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of the inexorable passage of time.

I used to love getting older.

On the flight over to the Gulf of Mexico, I wondered about how they say you can never go home again, but maybe an equally expensive reality is how many people, regardless of how many years or miles they put between themselves and where they were born, are never truly able to leave home.

Everything happens for a reason. But I would love to still be at Clemson.

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!

You can't go home again

Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn’t happened this morning, either.