"They had satisfied a childhood ambition by moving to the metropolis and becoming more or less successful there, yet most of them wanted to be somewhere else: they wanted to leave it all and go back to something, perhaps to their childhoods.
Of course they couldn’t go back: their own countrysides or Midwestern towns would offer no scope to their talents, no opportunity for earning the sort of living to which they had grown accustomed. They were inexorably tied to New York"
