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Just rereading Gerald Murnane's 'In Praise of the Long Sentence' and it got me wondering what your favorite sentences were — of other people's work, and of your own

I generally take note of passages more than single sentences, even long ones, but I will single out the almost page-long penultimate sentence of DeLillo's Underworld as perhaps my favorite long sentence (you can read it without "spoiling" the novel, which has no plot, but it does pick up phrases and motifs from earlier in the book that give it some of its power):

And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor’s yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and it’s your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk’s candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hall and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it’s only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive—a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills.

And then this, from early in Mrs. Dalloway, a sentence that opens the day-in-the-life novel out into immensities of time past and time future, is pretty unforgettable:

But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth.

Among older classics, I love the first sentence of Emma, for which see Paglia's reading thereof—about how the sentence begins in the 18th century and ends in the 19th—in Sexual Personae:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

Favorite sentences in nonfiction? I love the rolling rhetorical thunder of the one from Ruskin's "Nature of Gothic" I recently read out in one of my Invisible College lectures:

And therefore while in all things that we see, or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to prefer mean victory to honorable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, that we may the more surely enjoy the complacency of success

I'm sure I'm forgetting things. Melville, Joyce, Faulkner, Bellow, Morrison. Shakespeare, the Bible. The last sentence of Suttree. That's what I have for now, though.

In my own work? My favorite sentence in Major Arcana, to cite only my latest production, is probably this, the conclusion of an early chapter:

The social worker kept saying Jakey had “died by suicide,” and, because she was insane by this point and couldn’t really breathe, she’d said, just to see if she could say something, “Isn’t it ‘committed’? ‘Committed suicide’?” and then the social worker with the mousy hair and the glasses had said, “Well, that implies it’s a sin,” and she’d answered with the question, “Isn’t it? Against life, I mean?” and the social worker who may once have been a sex worker had said, with pity in her eyes, “I’m sorry—are you very religious?” and Jessica Morrow had said, finally, “No. I don’t believe anything at all.”

If that's too sentimental, or too particular to its context, and not euphonious enough, try the sound effects in this one:

Her head spun, rung, drummed; her stomach churned, burned, surged.

Or this, from an early description of the city called Cosmopolis:

The older buildings, the banks and department stores from the first part of the century, held runic messages on their friezes; strange demons nestled, staring, from their eaves and buttresses; masonic mysteries hid in the upper air.

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