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Here are 65 examples of long sentences ranging from the relatively brief 96 words to one of the longest sentences at 2,156 words.

Almost all of the really long sentences are under 1,000 words. The six longest sentences (1,000+ words) are mostly a curiosity, just to see what is possible.

I hope students of writing can study these sentences to find inspiration. My advice on how to learn from them? Try these three practices:

1. Copy them exactly
2. Take them apart, analyze each part, and see how the engine works
3. Ape their form with different content

I also hope this list might be helpful for teachers and professors of writing, who want more lengthy sentence examples to show their students. If you want to teach short sentences, I’ve also compiled a list of those.

The longest sentence in English is also awesome. The longest sentence award goes to:

Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, 13,955 word sentence
And for a runner-up: James Joyce, Ulysses, 4,391 word sentence
And there are even one-sentence books — actually, a few of them. But I’m not reposting an entire book.

And let’s end all this nonsense about how long sentences = run-on sentences. You can have a six-word run-on sentence (“I went shopping I ate donuts.”), while most of the sentences below are much, much longer than that and are not run-ons (except for a few examples like Jose Saramago). But whether the sentence is grammatically correct isn’t nearly as important as whether the sentence is fun or beautiful.

I hope that a study of very long sentences will arm you with strategies that are almost as diverse as the sentences themselves, such as: starting each clause with the same word, tilting with dependent clauses toward a revelation at the end, padding with parentheticals, showing great latitude toward standard punctuation, rabbit-trailing away from the initial subject, encapsulating an entire life, and lastly, as this sentence is, celebrating the list.