Chosen by The yank Scholar editors united of the “ten best sentences,” the passage, writes Roy Peter

Clark, achieves quite an feat: “Long sentences don’t sometimes hold along underneath the load of
abstractions, however this one sets a transparent path to the foremost necessary 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 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 an exceedingly bowl stretched its jaws; the
door banged shut, the steps creaked, the electric refrigerator hummed, the curtains billowed up, the pot
stewed, the gas hissed through the stove, the tree branches significant with snow crashed against the
roof; my heart beat loudly thud! thud!, small 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 ar stunned to search out the amount. we
tend to stand thereon rock of a period—with water all around America, and ask: however did we tend to
get here?”

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

Considering however common ill health is, however tremendous the religious amendment that it brings,
however astonishing, once the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that ar 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 bit rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks ar
uprooted in America by the act of illness, however we tend to go down into mythical place 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
acknowledgment of the immortal round-shouldered from the ground of Heaven to welcome America –
once we think about this, as we tend to ar often forced to think about it, it becomes strange so that ill
health has not taken its place amorously and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Blogger wife quotes Adeline Virginia Stephen 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 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 underneath her bottom and raised her such as you would a baby he may well be
thus howling after you didn’t expect it in an exceedingly manner it appeared necessary that you simply
didn’t expect it there was most nice in him she couldn’t update anybody she had been thus frightened
regarding being pregnant and he created her be proud) they were married once her missing her playing
period in March and he or she was still very little clumsy dark-complected Janice Springer and her
husband was a swollen lunk UN agency wasn’t sensible for all the world within the world male parent
aforesaid 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 people who love
language too made for the pinched limitations of routine synchronic linguistics and syntax.