Lies born from fantasy

What is the most repulsive sentence in English/American literature? Even as a 12-year-old American boy, I cringed when reading, in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls: ‘But did thee feel the earth move?’ At school I bought the myth of Hemingway as the master craftsman of American letters, teaching us to keep our sentences short and our syllables few. At university, however, I was privileged to be taught by R.S. (Ronald Salmon) Crane (1886–1967), the doyen of the Chicago Aristotelian school of literary critics, who showed the 1954 Nobel Literature Prize-winner’s lack of art by a close reading of his most celebrated and enigmatic ‘Nick Adams’ short story, ‘The Killers’ (1927) — filmed  for the cinema four times, with actors including Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Lee Marvin and Ronald Reagan.

‘In this story,’ says Wikipedia, going with the critical consensus,

Hemingway shows Adams crossing over from teenager to adult. The basic plot of the story involves a pair of criminals who enter a restaurant seeking to kill a boxer, a Swede named Ole Andreson, who is hiding out for reasons unknown, possibly for winning a fight.