Writing.Com General Discussion

I wonder if you will permit me to start and maintain this thread?

My only goals are two in number and quite simple: to share sentences and paragraphs that I find beautiful, and to encourage others to do the same so that I might add to my hoard.

I literally have a stockpile of one-thousand great, in my opinion, sentences and paragraphs.

If this is to work, people's choices must be respected. After all, there are many styles of writing, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

If it doesn't work, I'll just go away.

I'll start with a classic.

Format: Sentence/paragraph, work, author

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this
world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's
and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various
concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a
man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and
multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over
this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over
matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one
gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or
thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or
improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed
days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars,
perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of
the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this
earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And
early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

— The War of the World, H.G. Wells