The American Scholar recently published a list of its editors’ picks for the “Ten Best Sentences.” Fitzgerald took the first slot, with this sentence from The Great Gatsby: “Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
I like this Toni Morrison one that made the cut, from Sula: “It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
My own list would include the conclusion to the “Wave Speech” from Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back”; and, from Thoreau’s On Walden Pond, “It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing.”
What are some of your favorite—or least favorite—sentences?
