Greatest Sentence of All Time?

[nakia]

Tell me that's not frickin' LITERATURE, right there, baby.

LITERATURE.

YES! It is as if Faulkner went to Mars. And thought about dinosaurs.

As for opening sentences, I am fond of "The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed." "In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit" is nice, too.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

"In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit" is nice, too.

That's "In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit." If your going to qoute Tolkien, you better quote him correctly.

 

[LizardWizard]

Read Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Insane phrases like this can be found on every page of this monstruous novel.
However, English translators could have simplified the syntax, which isn't necessarily a bad thing...

 

[Ishamael]

...Taim appeared as close to a smile as Rand had ever seen him. "Kneel and swear to the Lord Dragon," he said softly, "or you will be knelt."

 

[Ishamael]

John 3:16: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

...Don't give me that look. It is literature.

 

[Psychic Warrior]

"I never thought anything that kinky could happen to me but there I was delivering a pizza when the 'lady' of the house answered the door; she was [deleted by censor]."

 

[Mallus]

OK, so there aren't any dinosaurs...

Or full-figured princesses from towns named after elements...

But I have to go with a classic...

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Makes me want to be lapsed Catholics, it really does...

 

[Gomez]

"For thousands more years, the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming onto the first planet they came across -- which happened to be the Earth -- where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."

 

[Pielorinho]

My all time favorite:

It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen

Daniel

 

[barsoomcore]

It's not a sentence, but this passage always gives me chills:

Suddenly the slim form went limp. The man eased her to the earth, and touched her brow lightly.

"Dead!" he muttered.

Slowly he rose, mechanically wiping his hands upon his cloak. A dark scowl had settled on his somber brow. Yet he made no wild, reckless vow, swore no oath by saints or devils.

"Men shall die for this," he said coldly.

I'm so glad I read pulp fantasy. That rocks.

And I'm being facetious neither here nor in my original post. I love this stuff. A lot.

Especially when it's illustrated by Frank Frazetta...