The Longest Sentences Ever Written

Evan Swensen
September 17, 2025

Every reader has faced a sentence that seems to stretch like a ribbon in the wind—elegant, relentless, and entirely unwilling to stop. Just when a pause feels certain, another clause unfurls. And another. Then another. What looks like a paragraph is, in truth, a single sentence galloping past commas, semicolons, and dashes like a runaway carriage.

This isn’t an accident. Some authors have made it their signature. They treat the period like a finish line far off in the distance, daring readers to keep up.

One of the most astonishing examples appears in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Proust once spun a sentence running 958 words long. That’s not a typo—958 words before the first merciful dot. The sentence appears in the fifth volume, The Guermantes Way, where he layers detail upon detail, as if he’s painting a cathedral ceiling one stroke at a time. Reading it feels like drifting through a dream: the world melts into fragrance, memory, and fleeting emotion, and the words carry you without pause.

James Joyce took a different approach but chased the same grandeur. In Ulysses, the closing soliloquy by Molly Bloom pours across more than 4,000 words without a single period. Only eight sentences make up the entire chapter, and one of them stretches so long it almost seems eternal. The effect is dizzying, like stepping directly into someone’s stream of thought without a door or a floor. Joyce didn’t just break grammar rules; he danced on them with delight.

Even more staggering, though less famous, is Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club. It contains a sentence running 13,955 words—currently considered the longest in literature. Reading it feels like coasting downhill on a bike with no brakes. The momentum builds, ideas tumbling faster and faster, as if the sentence itself forgets how to stop.

These marathon sentences aren’t about showing off. They mirror how the human mind sometimes works. Thought rarely arrives neatly packaged; it rushes in floods, zigzags through memories, spins into feelings, then back to observation before looping again. Authors like Proust, Joyce, and Coe capture this swirl. Instead of chopping thought into tidy blocks, they let it surge as it naturally does.

Of course, not every reader enjoys the ride. Some find such sentences exhausting, even exasperating. And that’s fair. They demand a different kind of attention—less like nibbling snacks, more like tackling a feast. Yet there’s an odd pleasure in surrendering to them. Once the rhythm sets in, the words become less about grammar and more about flow, like following a river downstream.

This bit of fun trivia reveals how elastic language can be. Sentences aren’t chains. They’re more like musical phrases. Some are short and crisp, like a plucked violin string. Others swell and stretch like symphonies, defying the very notion of an ending.

So the next time a sentence feels long, remember Proust’s 958-word breathless waltz, Joyce’s 4,000-word cascade, or Coe’s nearly 14,000-word rollercoaster. Compared to them, any long sentence in everyday reading is just a gentle stroll.

And maybe pause to enjoy the audacity behind these feats. Somewhere, an author decided a period could wait, and kept spinning thought into thread until it became a tapestry. It’s proof that language, at its wildest, doesn’t just communicate—it sweeps us away.

Stories like these remind us how words shape lives—how they can steady us, stir us, and spark change. The Power of Authors, by Evan and Lois Swensen, carries this conviction to its core. It isn’t a manual on writing but a meditation on purpose, showing how every word—whether in a novel, a thank-you note, or a simple message—can echo far beyond its moment. This book invites readers to see authors not only as storytellers, but as builders of memory, guardians of truth, and quiet catalysts of change.

It’s available now on Amazon (http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM), at Barnes and Noble, and everywhere good books are sold.