“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 wildily, as if the past were lurking here in the shadows 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.’
He talked about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was…”
Fitzgerald, Scott. ”Chapter Six.” The Great Gatsby.
Tags: F Scott Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, longing, nostalgia, reclaiming the past, yearning