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 typically hold along underneath 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 journal “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 keep 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 living during a bowl stretched its jaws; the door banged shut, the
steps creaked, the icebox hummed, the curtains billowed up, the pot poached, 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 tend to trust her semi-colons and follow till we tend to square measure stunned to seek out the
amount. we tend to stand thereon rock of a period—with water all around U.S., and ask: however did
we tend to get here?”

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

Considering however common unhealthiness is, however tremendous the religious modification that it
brings, however astonishing, once the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that square
measure then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a small attack of grippe brings to look at,
what precipices and lawns wet with bright flowers a bit rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and
obdurate oaks square measure uprooted in U.S. by the act of illness, however we tend to go down into
Inferno of death and feel the water of annihilation shut on top of our heads and wake thinking to seek
out ourselves within the presence of the angels and harpers after 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 salutation of the god unerect from the ground of Heaven to welcome U.S. – after we consider this,
as we tend to square measure ofttimes forced to consider it, it becomes strange so that unhealthiness
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 a few things to be embraced.”

Finally, from The Barnes & Noble Book journal, we've the terribly live-bearer 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 Gregorian calendar
month regarding missing her amount and aforementioned nice she was really frightened and he
aforementioned nice and upraised her place his arms around underneath her bottom and upraised her
such as you would a toddler he may well be thus terrific once you didn’t expect it during a means it
appeared vital that you simply didn’t expect it there was such a lot nice in him she couldn’t show
anybody she had been thus frightened regarding being pregnant and he created her be proud) they
were married once her missing her period of play in March and he or she was still very little clumsy dark-
complected Janice Springer and her husband was a egotistical lunk World Health Organization wasn’t
sensible for all the world within the world dada aforementioned and also the feeling of being alone
would soften a bit with a bit drink.

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