From Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Record , p. 116 

This one isn't so much stellar at the sentence level as as the level of meaning, but it gave my brain the same frisson, a spark that lit across the hyphen when I went from "huh?" to "oooooh!!!":

"The novel actually provided the bourgeoisie with both a substitute for and reformulation of initiation rites--that is, for access to experience in general." 

and, p. 120, a great sentence (a bit of contextual prose first, the sentence in question is the last).

"But the principal defect in Bertillon's anthropometric method was its purely negative quality. It permitted the exclusion, at the moment of identification, of individuals not corresponding to the data, but not the positive verification that two identical series of data referred to a single individual.' The unavoidably elusive nature of the individual, chased out through the door by means of quantification, was reentering by the window."