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.
So the date becomes an obstacle, a parapet that stops us from seeing that history continues to unfold along the same fundamental unchanging line, without abrupt stops, like when at the cinema the film rips and there is an interval of dazzling light.
"I Hate New Year's Day", Antonio Gramsci (translated by Alberto Toscano)
This essay as a whole is great, especially to read on a day like today. Thanks to Zoé Samudzi for posting it. Honorable mention to this technically two-sentence joint:
They say that chronology is the backbone of history. Fine.
Any sentence immediately appended with "Fine." is a kind of perfection.
You constantly misplace your house
Stumbled onto this while looking at a meme account on Instagram.
Even in this grimness there is wonder: I lived my whole girlhood in this valley, and I did not even know we had badgers.
"Sacrifice Zone", Claire Vaye Watkins (from the Winter 2022 issue of The Believer)
Watkins frequently produces perfect sentences; choosing just one from this essay felt unfair. Other perfect contenders included:
There is no place in Nevada's Pahrump Valley called Yellow Pine, yet I arrive.
(Not necessarily a surprise of a perfect sentence but a terrific opener and wonderful to say out loud nonetheless. I feel like one could not be from a place called "Pahrump Valley" without developing an affinity for poetics.)
Tortoises are not intrepid travelers.
(Good mouthfeel on this one IMO)
Newcomers call a place like this "nothing" or "empty", in an effort (I choose to believe) to grasp its vastness, a worshipful cry at the staggering expanse of land that is an obvious balm to city sprawl, to the long-plowed former prairies of the Midwest, the ill and raided forests of the East, the poisoned, burned, cow-chewed, bombed, and plundered ranges of the American West.
(A fine reminder that a perfect sentence does not need to be terse!!)
In the squelching vacuum of his death, a menagerie of capitalist creepy-crawlies came forth to continue his work with the same messianic force.
Palo Alto, Malcolm Harris
Is the sentence a bit over the top at first glance? Perhaps. But when you know the "his" in this sentence refers to Herbert Hoover? It tracks. (This was in an advance review copy of the book, so hopefully it stays in the final draft.)
Arrogance is, after all, one of the coefficients of money.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Caro
I confess this is in fact part of a longer sentence, which reads as follows:
Born to wealth that he believed would make him always independent, Moses felt no compulsion to turn associates into friends; arrogance is, after all, one of the coefficients of money.
The sentence as a whole is beautifully wrought, in and of itself perhaps perfect. Caro's choice to add that devastatingly precise cut as a semicolon-ed aside really twists the knife here. If he'd made it a separate sentence the vibe would have been much more accusatory and petty, whereas the semicolon makes it almost an afterthought. Listening to the audiobook while cleaning my apartment, I assumed it was a parenthetical aside based on Robertson Dean's reading. (A parenthetical is not quite as cutting as a semicolon aside, but it still suggests an informal casual-ness that in any case stopped me in my tracks.)
I first read The Power Broker in 2013; Jesse and I halfheartedly attempted a book club but after a while he either quit or I outpaced him, I can't remember. I decided to try the audiobook for a return read after seeing a performance of the play Straight Line Crazy at The Shed (which felt a bit on the nose for a venue selection, down to the mediocrity of the play relative to its ambitions).
That's it. I hope you enjoyed the sentences.