The Old Man and the Sea

I'm listening to it on audiobook. My favorite author used to be Salman Rushdie, for phrases like (from memory, i.e. roughly) "the station wagon of despair." This phrase from early in Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" reminds me of Rushdie, although chronologically Rushdie follows Hemingway:

The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat