Stanley Fish's Top Five Sentences—Now with Reader Contest!
Posted Monday, January 24, 2011 2:41 PM | By Nina Shen Rastogi

In his new book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, literary critic, legal scholar, and New York Times online columnist Stanley Fish offers readers a guided tour through some of the most beautiful, arresting sentences in the English language. As an introduction to both sentence craft and sentence appreciation, it is—in novelist Adam Haslett's words—"both deeper and more democratic" than Strunk & White's Elements of Style, celebrating everything from brief epigrams to twisty, rambling digressions.

Fish describes how he carries sentences with him "as others might carry a precious gem or a fine Swiss watch." Accordingly, Brow Beat asked Professor Fish for some of his favorite accoutrements, and he offered five from across three centuries:

John Bunyan (from The Pilgrim's Progress, 1678): "Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it, began crying after him to return, but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, Life! Life! eternal life."

Jonathan Swift (from A Tale of a Tub, 1704): "Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her appearance for the worse."

Walter Pater (from The Renaissance, 1873): "To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our lives fines itself down."

Ford Madox Ford (from The Good Soldier, 1915): "And I shall go on talking in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars."

Gertrude Stein (from Lectures in America, 1935): "When I first began writing I felt that writing should go on I still do feel that it should go on but when I first began writing I was completely possessed by the necessity that writing should go on and if writing should go on what had commas and semi-colons to do with it what had commas to do with it what had periods to do with it what had small letters and capitals to do with writing going on which was at the time the most profound need I had in connection with writing."

Jonathan Swift (from A Tale of a Tub, 1704): "Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her appearance for the worse."

The sky was the colour of a television screen, tuned to dead channel