what the title says.
there are sooo many for me but one of my favorite quotes ever is from a clockwork orange by anthony burgess:
“Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.”
I wouldn’t call it beautiful, but it’s extremely well-written and elegant:
“As the plan of battle lies in the general’s brain, when to move the left wing, when to explode the mine, when to bring up the cavalry, so the plan of a Hunters’ Pie and the obstacles chance might put in its way—a change in the wind upsetting the oven, an insufficiency of basil, the cat filching the anchovies—had occupied Ludla’s mind since daybreak.”
This one’s from the short story The Power of Cookery by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the way it’s written and the comparison are both so well done it makes me pleased to read it (and even convinced me to underline the passage in a forty-year-old book).