Favourite sentences and paragraphs from stories I read this year (2024)
Disorderly notebooks, irregular libraries, typing monkeys, and trust in a bystander having a ciggie.
As is traditional around this time, I've compiled an end of year list.
Throughout 2024, as I read stories and newsletters online, I kept a file of the passages which stood out to me. They may not all be from pieces published in 2024, but they all made me pause for a moment when I read them this year – because they taught me something, made me smile (or even laugh out loud), made me think, or sometimes because they made me wish I’d written that.
Here, in my final post for the year, I turn my attention away from history for a moment (although the theme does feature) and focus instead on the craft of writing.
I present to you my annual list of favourite sentences and paragraphs from stories I read this year.
Writing / creativity
"The three most beautiful words in the English language are not 'I love you' or even 'You've lost weight'. They are 'What happens next?'."
– Katherine Lanpher c/o Jacqui Banaszynski via Nieman Storyboard
In my view, a good notebook should be at best partially legible – that’s what creates its mystique. It should actively repel the casual viewer, and exude a feral air that unsettles intruders. It should be a disorderly space, defiant of bourgeois convention; a rowdy heath instead of a tidy garden. Its dark magic lies in a series of collisions, the juxtaposition of thoughts that, in any ordinary space, would not go together. The result should be an unruly object, defying polite society.
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via : How to keep a writer’s notebook“For every five people who read this book“, wrote one reviewer, “four will go insane”.
– Joshua Blu Buhs re: Charles Fort’s ‘Book of the Damned’ via The Public Domain Review
Knowledge
The problem plaguing historians who attempt to explain this creative explosion [the Renaissance] is that it occurred amongst a mostly illiterate population that didn’t keep diaries or write letters about the intense weird guy living upstairs.
– Mike Lankford via Lit Hub
Early modern libraries had no standardized classification system, and no international governing bodies to regularize anything. (An example of the challenges: the early 17th-century Cotton Library collection, which was one of the kernels for the British Library, was originally organized by reference to the busts of the Roman emperors who sat atop the shelves in Cotton’s long-since vanished home).
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via : The open-stack library: a futuristic technology from the 18th centuryHistory
The Byzantine empire did not fall as a result of the plague, but it did change. It became a more fearful place and more inclined to put its trust in religion than in the wisdom of the ancients. Instead of Aphrodite and Cicero, its people began to idolise the Virgin Mary. Religious processions took the place of chariot races. Emperors ruled less as Caesars than as fire-and-brimstone preachers, promising their subjects salvation in the face of a threatening apocalypse. In a sense, then, the ancient world ended here, not with a siege, but with a sneeze.
– Jacob Mikanowski via The Guardian
In Hawaii, [Captain Cook] had been circling the island in a vain attempt to keep his crew from disembarking, finding lovers and spreading more gonorrhea.
– Doug Bock Clark via New York Times
The Llyfr Iorwerth, is a 13th century Welsh lawcode that explains how a woman could divorce her husband under Welsh law. She was permitted to leave her husband within seven years of their marriage on one of three grounds – if he had leprosy, if he was unable to have sex, or if his breath stank! If this was proven, the woman would retain all her rights and possessions in divorce.
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via : Medieval women: in their own wordsModern women like shiny jewelry because their gathering ancestors sought colorful berries? Get the fuck out of here.
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via : The moral arc of the universe is bullshit“When I first saw this painting listed at auction back in 2020, I thought twice about suggesting the purchase, for fear of what Anne Boleyn would have thought of us hanging a portrait of the man who orchestrated her downfall in her home. However, I remembered that before Anne’s downfall, she had threatened Cromwell with his life, telling him that she wanted his head off his shoulders, and I then reasoned that, since the portrait only shows his head, we were, in a way, fulfilling her wishes."
– Dr Owen Emmerson c/o Zac Sherratt via BBC
Science
[Redwoods] can become so tall that their circulatory system can't pump water to the whole tree, so their upper needles have adapted to drink fog right out of the sky.
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via : Why I’m thinking about trees this morningA new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare's plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe. […] “It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works,” the study says.
– Hannah Ritchie via BBC
I learned recently that human beings glow […] In a study from 2009 performed by Masaki Kobayashi, Daisuke Kikuchi, and Hitoshi Okamura, five men were sealed in dark rooms and monitored with cameras so sensitive that they could detect light at the level of a single photon […] The authors of the study concluded that we all “directly and rhythmically” emit light, stating: “the human body literally glimmers. The intensity of the light emitted by the body is 1,000 times lower than the sensitivity of our naked eyes.” […] It’s a small study, of course, but it’s a startling and delicious thought: that amid the dimness, we are in fact, even if invisibly so, startlingly luminous beings.
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via : Literature will lose. Sunlight will win.People
They named a street after him in Paris, and – as, honestly, I would do – he promptly moved to that street, having all letters addressed to him as “M. Victor Hugo in His Avenue.” This is a boss move and I admire it.
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via : Hugo, Glen CocoWhether by boat shenanigans, poison, or falling rocks, Agrippina was indeed somehow murdered by Nero in 59 CE. Even after her death, though, Nero remained fucking terrified of his mother. At one point, he sent for a necromancer to summon her ghost so he could apologize. This is the most perfect encapsulation of Agrippina’s swag. I encourage us all to live our lives so our enemies are so afraid of us they call up our ghosts to admit they were wrong. RIP to a real one.
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via : A mushroom of one’s ownMost Australians, in a disputed account between a politician and a journo, would of course unhesitatingly go with the most trustworthy witness: the bystander having a ciggie.
– Annabel Crabb via ABC News
And that, then, is Born Free Press newsletter over and out for 2024!
I appreciate you getting to the end of this issue, and opening all the other emails I’ve sent this year. I’m so pleased that the premise of this newsletter resonates with you.
I look forward to sharing even more stories in 2025.
Happy new year!
