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Which Hemingway would you like?

You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars? - To Have and Have Not

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. - The Old Man and the Sea

Then there was the bad weather. - A Moveable Feast

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plains to the mountains. - A Farewell to Arms

Robert Cohn was once the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. - Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises

Each one of those opening sentences asks more questions.

Is that really what it was like in Havana? Why hasn't he caught fish for so long? Where was the weather bad? Which river, plains and mountains? Why did his boxing career stop at Princeton?

I do enjoy Hemingway, but especially I find his opening lines compelling.




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