That A Lot More became a mile, and then the inch was dropped because it doesn’t begin with an M, and we were left with ‘A miss is as good as a mile’,… - Mark Forsyth

Who needs sense when you have alliteration?

Yet hypotaxis (along with reason) has been declining for a century or more. Gone are those heady and incomprehensible sentences of Johnson, Dickens, and Austen, replaced with the cruel, brutalist parataxes of writers whose aim is to agitate and distress. The long sentence is now a ridiculed rarity, usually hidden away in the Terms and Conditions, its commas and colons, clauses and caveats languishing unread and unloved.

But facts obscure the truth, which is that writing prose doesn't make you a prose writer any more than philosophizing makes you a philosopher or fooling around makes you a fool.

The true paradox is arresting because it breaks all laws, but calming because it breaks all laws, but calming because that is so easy in language. it is easy to write that black is white, that up is down and that good is evil. It's as easy as typing, and as difficult. I can't do it, and I just did. But by breaking the laws of the universe, the true paradox lifts us out of it. The true paradox is, necessarily, a mystical moment, despite the fact that from a writer's point of view it's immensely easy.