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Figurative language and complex sentences aren’t much in vogue when it comes to the blogosphere, yet when asked to choose the ten greatest sentences from literature, the editors at The American Scholar hearkened back to the days of a well-turned phrase and scenes painted with the written word.

Would you agree with their choices, or are there one or two they missed?

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.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

—Toni Morrison, Sula

Full story at The American Scholar via Boing Boing.

The best of sound bytes in literature.

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