Klimt had just been branded a pornographer by the Austrian state over his university ceiling paintings. The line worth keeping: the government bought his next major work before the exhibition even closed, and it became the nation’s single most valuable cultural export.

Gaudí knew he would never see his church finished, and told critics his “client” wasn’t in a hurry. The line worth keeping: 143 years and one Civil War later, the building nearly finished exactly on Gaudí’s own centenary schedule, funded entirely by the people who came to look at it.

Byron and Percy Shelley both abandoned their entries in a casual ghost-story contest. The line worth keeping: the eighteen-year-old who almost had nothing to contribute produced the one story that outlasted every other name in the room, published anonymously because nobody expected a young woman to have written it.

All of Britain waited to watch the famous skeptic panic on his deathbed. The line worth keeping: he died so calmly, and so entirely without religious comfort, that his own best friend's account of it caused a bigger scandal than his lifetime of published philosophy ever had.

In 1967, the German literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss argued that no work is ever received in a vacuum; every audience brings a set of expectations shaped by everything they’ve seen before, and a work’s real impact often comes from how sharply it violates that horizon rather than meeting it. Vienna expected obscenity and got gold. Britain expected panic and got calm. A publisher expected an amateur ghost story and got the century’s defining nightmare. In every case this week, the mismatch between expectation and result is the whole reason the story survived.