Sentence No. 67 · 2 June 2026
Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde — The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The sentence opens with an imperative — "Resist it" — then pivots with a comma and "and" to deliver the consequence. This "imperative + and + result" construction always places the short command phrase first, before the longer clause describing what follows.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 5 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. Lord Henry Wotton holds forth on temptation and the pleasures of yielding to it. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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