a thread for posting sentences you read in a magazine or newspaper that make you go "that's a really nice sentence"

randal c. archibold in the NYT this morning:

"On and on they worked in the drink, making little progress but at least a little cash in a Sisyphean battle against the squalor that chokes the canals and ditches passing as sewers, causes floods of wastewater and helps spread the cholera epidemic now gripping more than half the country."

someone's been reading a little too much cormac mccarthy

still really like this kinda construction, tho

actually, I don't love this, the repetition of "little" is a bit off, the last sequence of clauses is hard to parse, and "Sisyphean" is just a distraction.

Oh, I thought this was the thread for being dicky about stuff other people like more than you, sorry.

:(

read it out loud - all of those s's and c's are so nicely placed. you have to be able to deal with long sentences i guess - and i am - to like that second part but it's prefectly parallel

I can't remember the last time I read a magazine, considering so many of them now consist mostly of advertisements, giant photos and silly captions. I blame Star and Life & Style for this.

Point taken about the s's and c's. I like long sentences too, but what I admire is a long sentence that's miraculously easy to read! This, to me, is not. Also, on second read the mid-sentence tense switch bugs me -- maybe this is part of what made the sentence hard for me to take in as a whole.