I am presently reading Cormac McCarthy’s “All The Pretty Horses”-I saw the movie years ago.
McCarthy seems addicted to very long sentences; here are two examples (page 5):
“At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted life like a dream of the past when the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the children and the women and women with children at their breast s all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only” or:
“When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horse’s hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders sang as they rode and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot slaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, a nation and ghost of a nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.”
I think these are a tad long…what do you think?
McCarthy is an OK writer-I don’t find him especially interesting.
But the movie was remarkably faithful to the book…although I cannot imagine two Aerican kids riding INTO Mexico to work for slave wages as cowboys.
No, long sentences are not bad writing per se. Current style leans toward short sentences, but there are plenty of great writers who write long sentences (e.g., Dickens, Faulkner).
Long sentences are fine. The problem arises when you lose clarity because of it. It’s possible to write long sentences that flow so naturally that you don’t ever lose track of what’s actually being said. I’m not sure the quoted sentences qualify, but lacking context it’s not really for me to judge.
What **Chuck **said - it’s a style choice that can be executed really well or really poorly…
I happen to love David Foster Wallace, known for his long, convoluted, often-footnoted digressive sentences and paragraphs that seem to wind their way along and somehow end up tied off and closed in a thoughtful, satisfying way…he’s a great writer who happened to write in long sentences - ones that worked for me…
Hugo wrote sentences that went on for pages!
Long sentences, if written well, can convey subtle shades of meaning in ways that short sentences cannot. If done poorly, there is no advantage gained from them.
Henry James was a master of conveying very complex thoughts through long sentence structures, ironically making his point much more compactly than he could have if he wrote like Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
I agree with everything said above and in addition, it’s also field-specific. Scientific fields tend to stress short sentences, and long sentences are, by default, “bad.” Imho, it’s because of the nature of the field, not the nature of the sentence itself.
Long sentences aren’t necessarily bad, but if you lose your audience, they are. I think it might depend on the genre or sub-genre you’re writing, too. Assuming you’re writing fiction, longer sentences would probably work better in literary fiction (not to say there aren’t literary fiction works with short sentences that read well), while if you’re writing mystery, horror or even romance, shorter sentences might be more impactful. That’s just my opinion, of course.
but given your username, you are uniquely qualified to comment on wordiness 
Ahh, I thought I recognized the name Cormac McCarthy. His writing was “featured” in B. R. Myers’s Reader’s Manifesto. (Which I highly recommend, BTW; it’s interesting, informative, and a fun read. :D)
Long sentences can be brilliantly written, as others have said, but styles along the lines of McCarthy’s are mostly just affected nonsense that doesn’t work so well if you actually read it. Myers says of McCarthy’s technique that it’s “meant to bully readers into thinking that the author’s mind operates on a plane higher than their own—a plane where it isn’t ridiculous to eulogize the shifts in a horse’s bowels.”
I like the cut of Myers’s jib.
While long sentences, as previously noted, are obviously more difficult and challenging for a novice reader to negotiate, the trick to writing long but clear sentences, as opposed to short but inscrutable ones, is subordination, a grammatical trick that inherently clarifies the sentences’ parts by placing the important clauses in an independent position (i.e. as the main clause) while placing the relatively unimportant parts (e.g., this description of the word “subordination”) in a dependent position, meaning that if that part were to be eliminated, the part left standing would still function as a complete sentence in itself.
What he said.
Taggart: Ditto.
Hedley Lamarr: “Ditto?” “Ditto,” you provincial putz?
I mostly agree with this. But I’d add that sometimes (especially in poetry or poetic prose, which may apply to the passages the OP quoted), the writer isn’t primarily aiming for clarity, but rather to convey a general impression or mood. The long, crowded sentences, like those in the OP’s examples, may be intended to convey the impression that there are a lot of things happening at once, or a lot of thoughts occuring to the viewpoint character at once.
If it works, it’s good writing; if it doesn’t, it’s bad writing.
Very long sentences like McCarthy’s, which have few subclauses, are meant to clatter into you like a steam train. They also appear very ‘juvenlie’ - all the ands and thens are what you’d expect from a six-year-old. It’s a deliberate stylistic choice rather than an attempt to be clear or write ‘well.’
Very long paragraphs are one of my pet hates. OP, if you don’t mind me saying, your post could do with a few double line breaks - most people tend to zone out after 6 lines or so. I wouldn’t usually mention it, but it’s in keeping with the thread.
I listened to All the Pretty Horses as a book on tape read by the late great Frank Muller. I loved it. I don’t know if I would have gotten lost in those long sentences on the page (I think they would have irritated me), but I realize now how much Muller was adding to the writer’s work with his perfect phrasing and rhythm. I don’t remember noticing any clunkiness or gracelessness when he read those parts. Some readers can really elevate a book.
Okay, so everything from “when the painted ponies” onward is description of the dream of the past, which is a simile for the ancient road before him, which takes on these characteristics when the shadows are long, the hour he’d choose to… what?
Isn’t this an exceptionally long sentence fragment?
Some long opening sentences from the American Book Review’s 100 Best First Lines From Novels.
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In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. - John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
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I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. - Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
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I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. - Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759n1767)
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Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. - Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)
Long or not I always liked this one.
The first two aren’t bad, but to be quite honest I would call the rest terrible!
Even a lot of the shorter openers in that list strike me as nothing much – though there are a lot of excellent ones, too. I kinda suspect that it’s really a list of “well-known opening lines” instead of a list of great first lines. In other words, some of those lines are only famous because they happen to begin famous books, not because of any particular qualities they possess. And the fact that they put Bulwer-Lytton’s infamous sentence in there makes me wonder if the whole thing isn’t somebody’s idea of a joke.
Though perhaps I’m also annoyed that it omits a few of my favorite openers. 
I’m with you there. Tolkien wrote a very straightforward, unaffected English which he nonetheless gave a distinctive style. More importantly, he seemed to know what writing was for and he had the skill to make long passages lucid.