The sexual outlaw sat alone in her room, considering her options.

Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock, Vere Chappell

Via a screenshot on Mari’s instagram stories. Could also work as the opening to a The Hold Steady song—imagine Craig Finn shouting this along the lines of “Charlemagne in Sweatpants.”

I’ll tell you right now: I’ve been a writer for most of my life, and we are about as important as a fart in the wind.

"How much money do we think Substack lost last year?", Elizabeth Lopatto for The Verge

Analysis slides off Prince Hat like water off a duck engendered from dark matter.

Good news everyone, I submitted my thesis to my committee last Friday. Hope they let me get my stupid master's degree so I can get my stupid doctorate. I'm so tired.

Powder metallurgy, though in its infancy, is a lusty and promising babe.

"Metal Sinews of Strength: This Is a War of Many Metals, for We Live in an Age of Alloys", Frederick G. Vosburgh for National Geographic (April 1942)

In the past week I’ve written some 9,000 words of my master’s thesis which is due to my committee this Friday. I have read and written a lot of not especially perfect but probably good enough to get a degree sentences in the process, and my brain is mostly soup. Many thanks to readers who submitted sentences this week—they buoyed my spirits and also mean this week was not kind of a wash sentences-wise.

Each one miniaturized an emotional world, matching TikTok’s hummingbird heartbeat.

“The Pulse of Pop Music Is Changing”, Spencer Kornhaber for The Atlantic

It was, by his account, a no-brainer, and it does seem as though the number of brains involved was narrowly circumscribed.

"Did Starbucks Really Put Olive Oil in Coffee?", Gideon Lewis-Kraus for The New Yorker

Submitted by v, with this runner-up that v claims is less funny out of context but it made me laugh before I actually read the story:

There was little to say but that it tasted like a large spoonful of olive oil in coffee.

It looks like a beard trimmer that plays Phil Collins songs.

"Get a Load of This Sorry Piece of Crap", Albert Burneko for Defector

While this sentence is perfect as a sick burn on the Tesla Cybertruck, it is a little harsh on Phil Collins.

A bunch of new subscribers signed up in the last week—welcome! A gentle reminder that if you enjoy this newsletter that I have a tip jar for one-time gestures of appreciation. (Apologies for crass acknowledgment of money but I am also a grad student piecing together freelancing and selling art to supplement a $22,000 research assistant stipend and my summer funding is in the air and in this economy, etc.)

DC-based readers: I'll be speaking with Malcolm Harris at Solid State Books on March 3 (this Friday!) about his recently published book Palo Alto. Some sentences from the advanced review copy of the book previously appeared in this newsletter.

OK, on to the sentences.

I wanted to write something someday with that kind of first sentence and I wanted that kind of first sentence to be written to me every day for the rest of my life.

Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon

Feels important to include the sentence Laymon’s writing about here, which is from the preface to Toni Cade Bambara’s short story collection Gorilla, My Love:

It does no good to write autobiographical fiction cause the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death where is thy sting and she snatches you up out your bed to grill you about what was going down back there in Brooklyn when she was working three jobs and trying to improve the quality of your life and come to find on this page that you were messin around with that nasty boy up the block and breaks into sobs and quite naturally your family strolls in all sleepy-eyed to catch the floor show at 5:00 A.M. but as far as your mama is concerned, it is nineteen-forty-and-something and you ain’t too grown to have your ass whipped.

This week was light on non-academic reading and heavy on trying to comport myself to the task of academic writing, which made for a smaller selection of perfect sentences for this newsletter. Such is the curse of the semester actually starting and entering the cadence of academia time.

One of the things I hate about academic reading is it tends to emphasize knowledge extraction over poetics; while I read and highlighted a lot of sentences this week whether the sentences were any good (or, more to the point, whether I could take the time to appreciate them) was another matter. This is partly why I set up this newsletter in the first place. Anyway, I'm working on it but this week was a bit light.

And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder adventurer—the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks: each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space.

A non-perfect sentences but adjacent cross-promotional update: I made a Valentine’s Day zine of dedication pages from books I own. It’s titled Dedication TK. You can buy it here for the book nerd in your life, or for yourself.

Lurk is a Turing-complete language for recursive zk-SNARKs.

“A Programmer’s Introduction to Lurk“

This was another week spent mostly at the National Archives, so my reading was once again a bit limited. Keep those submissions coming, friends—I have to actually start writing the thesis now so my reading time will be a bit curtailed.

The study of phantoms is at the same stage as previously reported.

September 1945 report on the Quartz Program in Brazil, Record Group 57 (US Geological Survey), Records Concerning the Quartz Commodity Program in Brazil, 1944–1945, Box 2.

A lot of these sentences were encountered and added on Tuesday, so I’ve been sitting with them for a while and I hope they aren’t overcooked.

Early on, the software had the regrettable habit of hitting police cruisers.

“Elon Musk’s Appetite For Destruction”, Christopher Cox in The New York Times

I spent most of this week at the National Archives doing research for my master’s thesis, so a lot of my reading has been frankly kind of dry government documents which do not lend themselves to perfect sentences. Nevertheless, the week (and even the archives) had some great ones.

Even if the crisis were to become worse, Communist propaganda would be confronted in the Argentine by a profound indifference to the future.

Report “Allegedly Prepared by Swiss Minister” on Argentina, Record Group 234 (Reconstruction Finance Corporation), Field Preclusive Operations Files 1942-47, Box 2

Hello and I hope you had a pleasant first week of the year! Here are some perfect sentences.

A stopped clock is right twice a day, but if it also screams and tries to terrify you, it’s haunted and you should get rid of it.

Calm Covid newsletter, Erin Kissane

Welcome to the first Perfect Sentences!

Some housekeeping as we get started:

• This opening newsletter is a bit wordy with annotations. Mostly you should just focus on the sentences, which is why they're set in bold. I'll try to keep the annotations to a minimum going forward but obviously I'm nervous and the opening move of new projects tends to involve a bit of over-explaining and trying to fill the silence.
• As a collection of the most perfect sentences I've come across while reading various things, most of them are not especially new sentences. This is not about sharing the best in recent writing, it is about appreciating perfect sentences.
• If you can, try reading the sentences out loud. It's very satisfying!
• Most of the sentences I share will be in English, maybe some in Spanish. Very small chance of some in Swedish. This is a matter of personal language limitations and not a comment on which languages do sentences better.
• I do accept sentence submissions from readers in all languages; translations are appreciated but more important to me would be getting audio of the sentence read out loud in its original language.

Anyway, here are the sentences.