"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."
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.
"The beet is the most intense of vegetables."
From Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.