As is traditional around this time, I’ve compiled an end of year list.
Throughout 2025, 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 2025, but they all made me pause for a moment when I read them this year – sometimes because they felt familiar and sometimes because they taught me something new, because they conjured a vivid picture in my mind, they made me think, they made me feel, and sometimes because they made me wish I’d written it.
Here, in my final post for the year, I present to you (in the order in which I came across them) my annual list of favourite sentences and paragraphs from stories I read this year.
Cafes and bars play a recurring role in artistic revolutions. In 1860s Paris, Café Guerbois was where Manet, Degas, Renoir, Baudelaire, Zola and others would meet to gossip, theorise and argue over wine and billiards. Monet, who also dropped in, later recalled, “Nothing could have been more interesting than these talks, with their perpetual clashes of opinion. You kept your mind on the alert, you felt encouraged to do disinterested, sincere research, you laid in supplies of enthusiasm that kept you going for weeks and weeks, until a project you had in mind took definite form. You always left the cafe feeling hardened for the struggle, with a stronger will, a sharpened purpose, and a clearer head.” It’s a beautiful articulation of the benefits of camaraderie among innovators.
– Ian Leslie via The Ruffian
“Tom [Edwards, owner of Stationers, the reporters notebook creators] said he loved knowing the first draft of history wasn’t in the newspaper, it was in one of his notebooks,” Garcia says.
– Gabe Bullard via Neiman Reports
[W]e lose something when handwriting disappears. We lose measurable cognitive skills, and we also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another. We lose the sensory experience of ink and paper and the visual pleasure of the handwritten word. We lose the ability to read the words of the dead.
– Christine Rosen via The Guardian
Look out, next time you pass through [the British Musuem], for discreet labels stuck to some of these doors, showing an illustration of a lion in profile. It is museum code for “evacuate me urgently in case of fire or flood” and means you are passing a storeroom. The symbol, it dawned on me this autumn, when I spotted a version made from glazed earthenware on display in gallery 47, derives from a set of 19th-century iron lions that adorned the building’s railings until they were removed in 1895. Only a museum could invent a code so arcane, so historically self-referential.
– Charlotte Higgins via The Guardian
I do live amid the ruins of many ideas and sometimes it is a garden. Sometimes one of them blooms at last.
– Alexander Chee via The Querent
We walk to a corridor just outside the kitchen where high on a wall are two small wooden doors. Behind them is what Caro calls “the cubbyhole.” […] Each day, when Caro returns from the office, where he still writes on an electric typewriter (a Smith Corona Electra 210, to be precise), he brings home the carbon copies from the day’s work, and they’re placed up here. Every so often the mass of paper is pushed back to make space for newer work. The space goes back about six feet, and he hasn’t filled it yet. He’s been doing this since shortly after they moved here, and nothing has ever been removed, so in this crawl space there is an incremental sedimentary record, laid down over nearly 35 years, of what Robert Caro has been doing.
– Chris Heath via The Smithsonian
Word spread that the formerly untouchable Agrippina had lost her powerful ally, so all of her enemies began to step up and voice their grievances against her. Charges were made against her that she’d been scheming against Nero, and Agrippina walked right over to her son’s palace like NERO STOP THIS SHIT and friends; so terrifying was this woman that Emperor Nero, The Boy Tyrant stopped that shit.
– Ann Foster via Vulgar History
The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they’ve never so much as attempted to dip in a ladle, let alone dive down into those uncomfortable waters made accessible through boredom.
– Craig Mod via LitHub
[F]ar from being pretentious, semicolons can be positively democratic. To use a semicolon properly can be an act of faith. It’s a way of saying to the reader, who is already holding one bag of groceries, here, I know it’s a lot, but can you take another? And then (in the case of William James) another? And another? And one more? Which sounds, of course, dreadful, and like just the sort of discourtesy a writer ought strenuously to avoid. But the truth is that there can be something wonderful in being festooned in carefully balanced bags; there’s a kind of exquisite tension, a feeling of delicious responsibility, in being so loaded up that you seem to have half a grocery store suspended from your body.
– Ben Dolnick via New York Times
[Essayists are] hunter-gatherers in their own memories, experiences, and interpretations, curators in the natural-science museum of their heads[.]
– Rebecca Solnit via Lit Hub
The human infant’s need to be carried has been mythologized as the downfall of an entire gender, an unfortunate but unavoidable hampering of freedom and movement. But what if it could be restaged as the first act of object-based problem-solving? What if the first human tool wasn’t a weapon of some kind —a bashing stick or a sharpened stone —but a bag, to keep one hand free for the baby and another for the world?
– Audrey Wollen via The Yale Review
[Aleister Crowley] got kicked out of at least three different schools for loudly blaspheming, cutting class, and smoking on school grounds. He contracted gonorrhea from local prostitutes. He became an English major and read the gothest poets he could find. He got extremely into mountain climbing. I’m aware that one feels a little out of left field, but I imagine he was muttering “hail Satan” under his breath once a minute upon leaving basecamp to maintain the vibe.
– Allison Epstein via Dirtbags Through The Ages
Even Joseph Scaliger, the model polymath of the late Renaissance, who worked longer days than his supposedly industrious Dutch neighbours and complained that he could not afford all the books he wanted, boasted of the stuffed bird of paradise that Amsterdam merchants had given him – though he also noted that it lacked a head. ‘If it had been whole’, he grumbled, ‘they wouldn’t have given it to me.’
– Anthony Grafton via London Review of Books
Many, if not most, of the Vatican’s collection of ancient Greek and Roman statues have been given fig leaf merkins to cover their characteristic nakedness. On my first visit to Rome, these leaves shocked and irritated me. There is just something so wrong about them. The fig leaf’s sheepish modesty fits awkwardly on such regal, powerful figures. It just doesn’t make sense for Achilles to sheathe his sword, or for Dionysus to hide his grapes.
– Lolo via Love Histories
Lists are how we fight chaos with ballpoint pens.
– Mira Ptacin via Longreads
[Street names] have proved more enduring and resilient than the buildings and sites they once described. A few yards east of the Millennium Bridge, for example, is a small inconsequential street named Broken Wharf. The watergate that it describes was already ‘broken and fallen down into the Thames’ in the 1590s; it is entirely possible that it had been so since at least 1209, given that its then owners, the Abbots of Chertsey and the Abbotts of Hamme, were described as having argued about its repair for 40 years in 1249. There is no record of it ever having been mended. That we should still be commemorating an insignificant quayside that may not have functioned properly for 800 years seems, on the face of it, unreasonable, if not ludicrous, but also somehow wonderful too.
– Mathew Lyons via The Broken Compass
[Coline Jenkins, great great granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on her ‘The Woman’s Bible’] A minister declared that it was the work of the devil. And Elizabeth says, “No, the Advisory Committee consisted of women. He was not there.” Isn’t that brilliant? Rather than getting argumentative, you just slice them off at the ankles.
– Maya Rodale via Hidden Herstories
[O]ur last name, NoiseCat, [… or] “Noiscat,” as it was once written, is a missionary’s bastardization of our ancestral name, Newísket. My family was colonized so hard we don’t remember what Newísket means.
– Julian Brave NoiseCat via The Paris Review
Mud ovens, which are what rural Gazan families have always used for cooking and baking, are dotted across the green patches that lie between the apartment blocks in Hamad City. The women they belong to are generous and volunteer their help when other families turn up needing to bake something, only asking them to bring enough paper and cardboard for fuel. But we didn’t have any paper or cardboard in the house—only my books. Ula looked at me timidly. “Let’s use one or two for now, and when the war’s over you can replace them,” she said, as gently as she could. “The kids need food more than they need to be read to.” The ugliness of it was devastating. In all the years I’d spent amassing my modest library, it had never occurred to me that I might one day have to weigh a book against a piece of bread for my children. I was stunned by the cruelty of the choice, paralyzed by the question it raised: How had things gotten this bad, this fast?
– Muhammad al-Zaqzouq via The Paris Review
With a few swipes of my thumb, I downloaded Duolingo, selected “Welsh,” and played the first quiz. The pleasure was immediate. Familiar sounds crystallized into verbs and nouns, as if there were some base material of Welsh already within me. How slow—embarrassingly slow for a writer—I had been to see that Mum’s language was a portable inheritance. If I learned Welsh, I could take it with me anywhere: it weighed nothing, yet it held my family, and so much else, inside.
– Dan Fox via The Yale Review
