# Quote — F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

> That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. [...] I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, we're all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
>
> Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.[...]
>
> After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

- Author: [F.Scott Fitzgerald](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fscott-fitzgerald.md)
- Book: [The Great Gatsby](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fscott-fitzgerald/the-great-gatsby.md)
- Page: 176
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby#Chapter_9) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/fscott-fitzgerald/the-great-gatsby/thats-my-middle

## More from this book

> No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

p. 2 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fscott-fitzgerald/the-great-gatsby/no-gatsby-turned-out.md)

> Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested. “After that my own rule is to let everything alone."

p. 172 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fscott-fitzgerald/the-great-gatsby/let-us-learn.md)

> "I wouldn’t ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can’t repeat the past."
>
> "Can’t repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
>
> He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
>
> "I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She’ll see."

p. 110 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fscott-fitzgerald/the-great-gatsby/i-wouldnt-ask.md)