What's the most bautiful thing (image, piece of text, etc.) you ever read?

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Originally Posted by Idril

Halldor Laxness regularly creates scenes that I proclaim to be the most beautiful thing ever written, the book Independent People is rich with such moments and I can easily say the book as a whole is the most beautiful book I've ever read despite it's bleak content. Here is a sampling:

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Those are some excellent quotes. I hadn't even thought of Halldor Laxness until you brought him up, but Independent People is filled with beautiful moments. Halldor Laxness has a way of romanticizing everything, but in Independent People that instinct is supercharged by the young artist character, Nonni. His perspective is one of imaginative pantheism; and, when the story is told from his perspective, Laxness really indulges in flights of imagination. The part where he's imagining the life of the kitchen implements is a very characteristic scene.

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Originally Posted by WayneHughes

From Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad:

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And that's like page two of Heart of Darkness, right? Already Conrad has driven to the center of the story without so much as having to introduce the plot or characters. What an excellent way to start the novella.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

The first two pages of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel has to be the most beautiful opening I can recall to a novel

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Yes, you strike me as a Thomas Wolfe fan. I actually didn't remember that opening, though, until you pointed it out. It is quite good. Another good part might be from the other book with those characters--I think it's something like Of Time and the River or Of the River and Time. There's a part where the main character has a dream representing his father's death. It's not beautiful in a picturesque way, but I thought it was beautiful it's own way. Unfortunately, I don't own the book so I can't quote it.

From Evelyn Waugh's 'Brideshead Revisited':

"Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare of her summer days- such as that day- when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour..."