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
Thanks to Melissa for nominating this one; I subscribe to this newsletter but hadn't read it yet and knowing that sentence lay within was very exciting.
Sometimes referred to as molecular sieves, zeolites have a network of very small pores that cover their framework.
Determining Criticality of Rare Earth Elements in the Petroleum Refining Industry, Kirsten Guelly
I'm doing some research on lanthanide use in petroleum refineries for my advisor, and this undergrad thesis from 2013 gave a decent for-newbies overview on the chemistry of fluid cracking catalysts. I don't know if the author took much delight in crafting the sentence, but it's got good mouthfeel and something in "molecular sieves" and "very small pores" induces in me an irrational tenderness toward zeolites.
The word he chose to express "fragile" was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning, the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web.
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
Oh goodness, what a novel. I'm pretty sure this is a famous sentence, but it's always worth it to read a perfect sentence again. Some other top sentences, also probably familiar but also worthy of return:
For a long time he had been white smoke.
(Just begs to be repeated over and over!!)
He wanted the words to make a cloudless blue sky, pale with a summer sun pressing across wide and empty horizons.
The jungle breathed an eternal green that fevered men until they dripped sweat the way rubbery jungle leaves dripped the monsoon rain.
(I would have been sold on this just with "The jungle breathed an eternal green" but then Silko just punches you in the throat with those fevered men and rubbery leaves, damn)
The flood water was the color of the earth, of their skin, of the blood, his blood dried brown in the bandages.
(One really beautiful thing about this novel is how it slips in and out of time, sometimes down to the level of the sentence.)
The yellow stained walls were at the far end of the long tunnel between him and the world.
She did not like the cattle business and she was pleased to have a scientific reason for the way she felt.
In a world of crickets and wind and cottonwood trees he was almost alive again; he was visible.
I definitely learned about Leslie Marmon Silko's work from editing and designing a zine for an essay by Lou Cornum back in 2018. I feel bad it took me this long to read Ceremony! But I'm excited to finish it and I highly, highly recommend Lou's sentences as well.
They shine like steel swords
"Never Quite Free", The Mountain Goats
Ramsey found a cassette of All Survivors Pack (an album of demo versions of the songs on 2011's All Eternals Deck) on eBay and got it for me for Christmas, and I finally broke out my cassette player to give it a listen this week. The demo version of "Never Quite Free" sounds very old-school Mountain Goats: stripped down, tape hiss, the keyboard just a little out of tune somehow. In this respect, it is a bit more menacing than the full album version.
Also, this sentence is meant to describe stars. Stars! Can you believe it?
We were heavily armed, and we had crystals.
Private First Class Robert Gottlieb, as quoted in Crystal Clear: The Struggle for Reliable Communications Technology in World War II, Richard J. Thompson, Jr.
My master's thesis research is very niche and dry (TLDR: trying to figure out where the rocks in the first computers came from) but because part of it is about quartz crystals there's a lot of really good and funny crystal-related sentences, like this one. This World War II propaganda film has some more (pun not intended) gems, and context.