words I liked in 2024
I keep a rolling iPhone note every year for quotes and words that have stuck with me (or that I'd like to stick). They come from books, newsletters, my friends, overheard snippets on the tube. Here are some of my favourites from this year.
“Sometimes the hardest thing is just really admitting what we actually want out of life, rather than what we feel we should want.”
Starting with something evergreen from my friend Ellie Jackson’s newsletter. I read a lot (for work and play) about the internet, social media and the way it shapes our perception of ourselves, and my quotes notes are littered with many reflections that could be boiled down to the above.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
“That’s the only reason to be an artist… to bear witness.”
“Recording is to be at a distance. Watching someone else dance is no good, even if it does swell the heart for a moment. I want to be in the spin, not sat on the bed watching.”
Always brimming with thoughts about the act of recording and making. A trio from Joan Didion, Philip Guston’s Tate exhibition, and Kaiya Stone’s newsletter KNOT CONTENT.
“An advantage of keeping a diary consists in the fact that one becomes aware with reassuring clarity of the transformations one incessantly undergoes... In the diary one finds proof that, even in conditions that today seem unbearable, one lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand thus moved as it does today...”
Validation of continuing to record and reflect, from none other than Franz Kafka - taken from Jillian Hess’s newsletter on notes and note-taking. But a related reminder from one of my longstanding favourite newsletters:
“It’s nice that I have been writing small things down for so long because small moments are easier to remember, but writing things down doesn’t capture everything.”
On recording through the camera:
“Allow myself to be surprised by the results, after the wait to see the pictures; look on them not with a critical eye, but with acceptance and curiosity, the way I do paintings, or the works of others, or children.”
"The past is so present in the work, but I struggle with the saccharine sheen of nostalgia. I think it’s always dangerous when you shoot on film as well”
The first from Alice Zoo on enjoying your film photography - useful for someone who often feels great disappointment when I get photos developed, lessons for a kinder eye. The second from Max Ferguson. Shooting film has a tendency to transform the present moment into a memory almost as soon as the shutter goes down, and I do worry about how much photographing effects my ability to remember outside of captured frames. And elsewhere on photography:
“To suffer is one thing: another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them.”
Susan Sontag’s On Photography is one of the first non-fiction books I remember leaving a world-changing mark on me, and it only gets more and more prescient nearly fifty years (fifty years!!) after it was first published. I wrote down lots of quotes from a skim re-read, but this one seems the most prescient in a year full of images of dead children that have done nothing to stop more being killed.
In other dystopian topics I read a lot about the growing impact of Large Language Models on what it means to write and record, particularly the strangling of language and pluralism of expression:
“The employment of these models is deeply antisocial not only because they off communication between two humans, but also and more importantly because they cut off communication with and within the self. Their use foments an instrumentalist view of writing and even speaking, of language itself, foreclosing the possibility that we might use language as a means of discovery.”
From Marianele d'Aprile’s newsletter, the immense wave.
“I think it neatly sums up the appeal of trains. How they enclose us yet also open the world up, offering a rest from ordinary life and encouraging contemplative indolence. The chance to move through the world while staying quite still. Time out while gazing out.”
I love Caroline Eden’s writing about travel and train train travel in particular. This one was read in her newsletter.
“Spring is the Friday of the year. It holds all the potential of the weekend ahead.”
My friend Josh, at the pub.
“A relationship is a story two people are always building. A relationship is a small religion you both have to believe in with fervour, or risk it falling apart.”
I often find find flashes Sophie Mackintosh’s novels in my annual quotes notes, but this one is from her newsletter Little Intimacies - one of my favourites.
“Maybe thorns have roses.”
I saw this on a postcard in a cafe in Belgium and it really stuck with me. Apparently attributed to Alphonse Karr.
“The day's fabric thins and the present loosens its grip.”
“It was that part of the day where the light goes vertical and blue, and everything takes on a spectral quality. For about half an hour, it's like living in a movie. Everything attains a quality of luminosity and importance, and everyone is beautiful and languid.”
I loved these two characterisations of my favourite time of day, the blue hour. The first from Jean Sprackland’s memoir of graveyards, These Silent Mansions, and the second from Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans.
“Looking back at myself then, I can't help feeling that I had come down with a type of connection-fever, and maybe what I was in love with above anything was the glimmers of togetherness glimpsed across the lakes of difference.”
I read Polly Barton’s book Fifty Sounds when in Japan and it was one of my very favourite reads of the year. About so many things, but what resonated the most was her experiences of being a very young person living somewhere where you become a foreigner. On similar note, from Robin Craig’s newsletter:
“It is important to hold on to who we are when we are elsewhere. Between these two states, it is briefly possible to see everything you could be.
One of the last books I read this year was Hisham Matar’s My Friends, gulped down over Christmas Eve to Boxing Day. So much in there on family, exile, love and the city of London:
“A vast distance exists between a protester and his slogan; the entire history of politics exists in that gap.”
“She was always so happy that it made me wonder whether this was what London was made for. Although living here often felt like hard labour, visiting must have seemed like life itself.”
“Love and pity are not the same. Sometimes the love we feel seems much more easily endured if converted to pity, when that just kills it.”
Much of my quotes note this year is words grappling with the despair, anger and grief of current events and responses to them - both from those within my circles and far above and beyond.
“Unfortunately part of the burden – and joy — of being on the left is continuing to believe in the possibility of serious material change, of liberation, even in the most unlikely circumstances. Resistance and hope are not mutually exclusive. They are dependent on one another.”
“I do think it is our responsibility, especially if we believe ourselves politically and socially engaged, to find our way in a lane of change, to agitate power in a way that makes sense for us. If we believe ourselves politically and socially engaged, we need to offer others who are not a hand rather than fire and brimstone.”
From Francesca Newton at Vashti Media, and Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. I have found much solidarity and solidity in reading the writing of wise, patient, principled people throughout the year.
“Sometimes I think hope is a far less satisfying feeling than despair.”
Something else I try to remind myself when it feels too easy to slip into despair (Julia Armfield’s Private Rites).
“How quickly did the belly of despair turn itself over into hope, the give of the skin of overripe fruit.”
The converse of this (The Safekeep by Yael van den Wouden). And for choosing hope, choosing optimism, Rebecca Solnit, then Elan Ullendorf:
“Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”
“I'm pessimistic when I look at the centers of power, and I'm optimistic when I look at the margins of power, which I think is often the way that I look at the world.”
And to end with something evergreen from Salome Wagaine’s Peeled and Portioned:
"I am trying my very best to remember that I love my fellow man and am in no way superior to those who I disagree with, given I am not the moral arbiter of the universe and am equally flawed, but -"