Saturday, April 30, 2011

One sentence:

"This strange and instant healing of the frenzied and struggling woman the moment she was brought to the chalice, which used to be explained to me as shamming and, moreover, almost as a trick arranged by the "clericals" themselves - this healing occurred, probably, also in a very natural way: both the women who brought her to the chalice and, above all, the sick woman herself, fully believed, as an unquestionable truth, that the unclean spirit that possessed the sick woman could not possibly endure if she, the sick woman, were brought to the chalice and made to bow before it."
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov

Throughout school I was continually berated for my excessive usage of punctuation, particularly with commas. But I guess a big "I told you so" is in order as Dostoevsky so blatantly proves that a timeless and renowned novel can be written in such a writing style.

2 comments:

  1. I love commas. Most of the classics are written with long, comma-riddled sentences. I love it.

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  2. Nothing wrong with a little punctuation. It makes an otherwise boring statement come to LIFE!

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