Favourite sentences and paragraphs from stories I read this year
The words and ideas that stood out to me in 2023.
As is traditional around this time, I've compiled an end of year list.
Each year I keep a file of snippets from stories that struck a chord with me. They may not all be from stories published in 2023, but they all stood out to me when I read them this year – because they taught me something, made me smile, made me think, or sometimes because they made me wish I’d written that.
I hope some of them might do the same for you.
Art / Music
If no one wanted to put them in exhibitions, [Phyllida Barlow] put her art into the world any way she could. […] Sometimes she would simply “throw objects into the Thames at the dead of night”. When I asked what audience there was for these works, she said: “There was no audience at all. An audience of one.”
– Charlotte Higgins via The Guardian
Rage Against the Machine is like the ring in ‘Lord of the Rings’. It drives men mad. It drives journalists mad. It drives record-industry people mad. They want it. They want the thing, and they’re driven mad.
– Tom Morello, courtesy of Andy Greene, via Rolling Stone
[David Byrne told me] that in the days of vinyl LPs, if you wanted to squeeze a few extra tracks on your album and push past the 42-minute limit, you had to remove bass frequencies from the mix so that the physical grooves on the record would be smaller.
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via ‘Immortality, A User’s Guide’He peels the lemon, then lets the peel dangle. The white pith, so cunningly outlined, corkscrews down the table like a Slinky, while the nubbed yellow rind jumps out against the green tablecloth. (No other great artist leaves me craving a martini.) The spiralling lemon peel was [Willem] Heda’s absolute favourite swagger move. […] Each lemon was a spectacle, each peel its own little still life.
– Jason Farago via The New York Times
Creative practice
“Artists need constraints! And prompts are like constraint-dispensing machines,” Mason Currey told me. “The worst thing in the world is to be able to make anything you want, in any medium, according to any time frame – that's the perfect recipe for a creative block. A prompt instantly limits your options, forces you to think in a narrower groove. That's good for getting ideas flowing or clarifying preferences and goals.”
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via ‘The Best Creative Constraints Are The Oblique Ones’“Ideas are getting harder to find” is a pretty bleak thing to believe. It says, “Look around the world. This is pretty much as good as it gets; the returns start diminishing from here. All the problems you see are unlikely to be solved anytime soon, so you better get used to them.” Why would anyone agree to such a thing without putting up a fight? […] Optimism cures pain; pessimism, like painkillers, merely dulls it.
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via ‘Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them’Altered states, which are often regarded as ‘higher’ forms of consciousness, are actually lower forms of consciousness. An altered state of consciousness is one that’s missing the full complement of abilities that are present when the brain is functioning normally. Yet a brain in this state is able to do things that the normally functioning brain cannot.
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via ‘Accessing the Riches of Your Creative Mind’If you’re feeling creative vibes, stop everything you’re doing and hold on to that vibe!
Etymology
According to the author and magician Alan Moore, one way of defining magic is “the intentional manipulation of consciousness”. Moore reminds us that spells and grimoires are just another way of saying ‘spelling’ and ‘grammar’. Every speech, every novel, every joke, every Tweet, every diatribe and every text is a subtle act of magick, whether we realise it or not.
– David Bramwell via The Idler
For the ancient Greeks, learning and leisure were precisely the same thing. The Greek word ‘skole’, which eventually turned into our word ‘school’, means ‘leisure’ or ‘free time’. Education should be fun and it should be a lifelong process, not merely a means to getting a job (ie: earning money).
– Tom Hodgkinson via The Idler
The term ‘studio’ derives from a verb as well as a noun. ‘Studiolo’ denoted the scholar’s study or cabinet, but there was also ‘studiare’, linked to a certain kind of diligent or pleasurable work, which could take place anywhere. The word ‘studio’ was not used to describe the workplace of an artist until the late 17th Century in Italy, and in Britain only from the 19th Century.
– Tom Stammers via London Review of Books
Expectations
I am not nice. I despise ‘nice’. Nice in our social construct is just another weapon to keep us silent. To keep us in our place. Because if we drill down into it, nice is just another form of oppression. To be nice is to be passive and in many cases dishonest. Being nice is a way of forcing someone into doing nothing, saying nothing, and standing for nothing, because it may cause someone else discomfort. And so it is used as part of the armoury of civility, wielded by those who hold power and are actively engaged in not feeling discomforted, in holding onto the way that things always have been. Because those ways have always been very, very comfortable for them. They’ve been very nice. Discomfort is for the not-nice among us.
– Amy Remeikis via ABC (h/t Dense Discovery)
Baby’s first wrinkle was between the eyes, created from furrowing my brow, which is the face I make whenever I’m speaking, or listening, or expressing concern, or thinking, or reading. So, basically, the face I’m making at least sixty to seventy percent of the time. I call it the thinking wrinkle, or, The Thinkle. […] Have you ever stopped to consider why some wrinkles on a woman’s face are more acceptable than others? Anyone who does a touch of Botox gets rid of their Thinkle. But they often leave their crow’s feet untouched. Let that sink in: We’re allowed to have wrinkles that come from smiling, but not the wrinkles that come from thinking. I’m frankly tired of seeing women my age (and older) with curated wrinkles.
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via ‘Disptach #25: A Thinkle in Time’Boundaries are the choice between disappointing me or someone else.
– Marcella Chamorro via Dense Discovery
Nostalgia
[Before the Second World War] Being a housewife was a full-time project and shopping was a daily, carefully choreographed, often arduous routine: from one shop counter to another, from the care of one sales assistant to the next, the fabric of a morning was a patchwork of little queues.
– Ruby Tandoh via
‘How the Sainsbury’s Design Studio Packaged a Nation’s Dreams’George and Nina run the kind of place you drive by for years, then one afternoon, your tire needs fixing nearby and at last you push through the old swinging doors. With a lurch, you unmoor from time. Before you, in faded pink and pale blue, is the kind of interior you’d believed extinct. A chipped old countertop stretches the length of seven round stools, then horseshoes around the other side. Cloudy salt and pepper shakers stand at the ready, last touched yesterday or in 1973, hard to say. […] Hard to pinpoint exactly when the clock stopped, but judging by the fonts and the colour scheme and the pinball and the fried ham and the jukebox selections and somehow the quality of the air you breathe, the planet’s orbit of the sun halted in the late ’70s or early ’80s. So thorough is the effect that occasional intrusions of modernity – the chime of a phone, a person under 40 entering – register simply as glitches in the code and thus fail to break the spell. […] The Giavrises have jammed their spatula into the gears of the cosmic clock. It’s the boldest thing you can do in this life, the biggest swing you can take – halt the incessant ticking, or at least mount a noble resistance.
One of the things I love about London is […] the way the city embraces its own bleakness and gloom, dawning its foulness like a moth-eaten cloak and swishing it round, just for kicks. […] I find it a comfort to know I am living in a place where, at any given moment of the day or night, terrible and wonderful things are happening to everyone all over the place and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.
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via ‘Liminal London’Science / Nature
When overall life expectancy was 35, that didn’t mean that everyone dropped dead before reaching 40. Many people lived into their 70s or 80s. It’s just that a massive section of the population died six days into their life, or six years. Those childhood deaths pulled the average down.
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via ‘Birth Of A Science’[On cassowaries] Mr. McMahon describes them as being more ‘emo’ than ‘emu’. “They live in their dark abyss of the rainforest, and they don’t like being looked at the wrong way or talked about the wrong way,” he said.
– Natasha Frost via The New York Times
We've got this kaleidoscopic inner life: emotions! thoughts! images! But your brain does not offer screen-sharing. If you want to convey what's inside your head, all you can do is waggle your tongue and hope to vibrate other people's ear-bones at a frequency that makes them understand.
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via ‘Sorry pal, the woo is irreducible’Writing
Seven days a week I perform the three-step commute across the backyard to the former turf shed that is now my office. Or the Black Lizard Studio, as I have dubbed it, because one day a black lizard walked across a print-out of my novel ‘Beatlebone’, then close to being finished, and I immediately got down on the floor and wrote a black lizard into the text. I did so because I believe that a kind of sympathetic magic should occur around the edges of one’s writing projects; if it doesn’t, the project is probably fucked.
A lot of good writing is procrastinating! I mean, the avoidance is integral to it. Not just because procrastination helps you build up enough pressure to finally do the work […] but also because not doing what you’re supposed to do all the time is good for the soul! Writers should be slackers, to some extent, and bring us back messages from the land of the slackers. Because you know what slackers have time to do? To think! And the absurdity and self-contradiction inherent to procrastination is fertile ground for interesting thinking.
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via ‘Samuel Johnson and the art of procrastination’To most people, rewriting is an act of cosmetology: You nip, you tuck, you slather on lipstick. To Danny [Kahneman], rewriting is an act of war: If something needs to be rewritten then it needs to be destroyed. The enemy in that war is yourself. […] Danny taught me that you can never create something worth reading unless you are committed to the total destruction of everything that isn’t.
– Jason Zweig (h/t Billy Oppenheimer)
When [Lauren] Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a bankers box – and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.
– Elizabeth A Harris via The New York Times
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.
– Annie Dillard via ‘The Writing Life’ (h/t
)And that’s Born Free Press over and out for 2023!
Thank you for reading this issue, and everything else I’ve published this year. I’m so pleased that the premise of this newsletter resonates with you.
I look forward to sharing even more stories and snippets in 2024.
Happy new year!