Chosen by The yankee Scholar editors together of the “ten best sentences,” the passage, writes Roy

Peter Clark, achieves quite an feat: “Long sentences don’t sometimes hold along below the burden of
abstractions, however this one sets a transparent path to the foremost vital phrase, planted firmly at the
tip, ‘his capability for surprise.’”

Jane Wong at Tin House’s web log “The Open Bar” quotes the hypnotic sentence below from Jamaica
Kincaid’s “The Letter from Home.”

I milked the cows, I churned the butter, I hold on the cheese, I baked the bread, I brewed the tea, I
washed the garments, I dressed the children; the cat meowed, the dog barked, the horse neighed, the
mouse squeaked, the fly buzzed, the cyprinid fish living in a very bowl stretched its jaws; the door
banged shut, the steps creaked, the icebox hummed, the curtains billowed up, the pot cooked, the gas
hissed through the stove, the tree branches serious with snow crashed against the roof; my heart beat
loudly thud! thud!, little beads of water grew folds, I shed my skin…

Kincaid’s sentences, Wong writes, “have the power to at the same time suspend and propel the reader.
we have a tendency to trust her semi-colons and follow till we have a tendency to area unit stunned to
search out the amount. we have a tendency to stand thereon rock of a period—with water all around
U.S., and ask: however did we have a tendency to get here?”

The web log Paperback author brings U.S. the “puzzle” below from infamous long-sentence-writer
Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill”:

Considering however common sickness is, however tremendous the religious modification that it brings,
however astonishing, once the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that area unit then
disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a small attack of flu brings to look at, what precipices and
lawns besprent with bright flowers a touch rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks
area unit uprooted in U.S. by the act of illness, however we have a tendency to go down into Hell of
death and feel the water of annihilation shut higher than our heads and wake thinking to search out
ourselves within the presence of the angels and harpers once we have a tooth out and are available to
the surface within the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the Mouth —- rinse the mouth” with
the acknowledgement of the spiritual being unerect from the ground of Heaven to welcome U.S. – once
we consider this, as we have a tendency to area unit ofttimes forced to consider it, it becomes strange
so that sickness has not taken its place amorously and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of
literature.

Blogger Rebecca quotes Woolf as a challenge to her readers to become higher writers. “This sentence
isn't one thing to be feared,” she writes, “it are some things to be embraced.”

Finally, from The Barnes & Noble Book web log, we've got the terribly poeciliid fish Bloom-like sentence
below from John Updike’s Rabbit, Run:

But then they were married (she felt awful regarding being pregnant before however Harry had been
talking regarding wedding for a jiffy and anyway laughed once she told him in early Feb regarding
missing her amount and aforesaid nice she was very frightened and he aforesaid nice and raised her
place his arms around below her bottom and raised her such as you would a baby he might be therefore
extraordinary once you didn’t expect it in a very approach it appeared vital that you just didn’t expect it
there was most nice in him she couldn’t confirm to anybody she had been therefore frightened
regarding being pregnant and he created her be proud) they were married once her missing her play in
March and he or she was still very little clumsy dark-complected Janice Springer and her husband was a
swollen lunk WHO wasn’t sensible for love or money within the world pappa aforesaid and also the
feeling of being alone would soften a touch with a touch drink.

Sentences like these, writes Barnes & Noble blogger Hanna McGrath, “demand one thing from the
reader: patience.” which will be therefore, however they reward that patience with delight for those
that love language too wealthy for the pinched limitations of quotidian synchronic linguistics and syntax.