Ray Bradbury always had some very quotable stuff. By today's standards I guess he'd be too flowery or whatever, and he goes off on tangents, but I've just always had this thing for prose that reads like poetry. A unique turn of phrase or spectacular imagery always sticks in my mind long after I finish a book and sometimes when I come across a line like that I'll just sit there and reread it a few times.
There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight-Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck-tonight you could almost taste time.
*****
The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.
And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night.
Both from The Martian Chronicles.
I'm also a big fan of the opening lines of The Last Unicorn, though I have been mocked for this. Watership Down has some great passages too that really bring the setting to life.
Prose that you 'notice', even in an appreciative way, is considered something to avoid in modern writing, and that's kind of a shame. I feel like writing that sort of thing is becoming a lost art.
