“Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.”

Why is it great? For Halloween, I decided to use this wonderfully spooky line from Mark Twain (who in his writing and his speaking was a true master of the Great Sentence). Starting with the rhythm of “away out in the woods,” it has a ghost-story-around-the-campfire feel: Gather ’round, boys, and keep one another close, because away out in the woods there, a ghost is lonesome and thwarted and grieving, and who knows what it might do? But Twain also brings a sense of empathy to the sentence, so even while we’re frightened, we feel for the ghost’s inability to unburden itself.