Interesting thread, and as I don't know how I'd choose a part in a short story (always more "beautiful" in context), would this haiku work? (Obviously not much of a poet, and this isn't strictly haiku, I think the proper name might be senryu? I like the way the short form is all about essence, anyhow... canvas cheek wet paint’s gentle kiss tender artist strokes
I've been looking around because I'm keen to share but nothing strikes me as beautiful, let alone the most beautiful.
Just a blurb between battles from my still in progress novel: Standing on the bridge, watching the space out the window begin to shift as we change course. Catching sight of the pale brilliant blue ball called Neptune, in the left lower corner of the large glass. It glows happily in the blackness around it, as it makes its way through orbit around Sol. Further out from it I spot the greenish bluish dot of Uranus, winding in its odd fashion along the invisible track. It never ceases to amaze me just how beautiful things are in the uncaring, unforgiving vacuum known as space. From the birth of stars, to the fantastic solar clouds of nebulae. It truly makes one wonder how something so dead, can be so full of life. Pondering the mystery in the majestic vastness, gazing upon the galaxies that forge their own way through the black ocean like fish without a care
The one extract I'd like to post most on this thread is the very last passage of my wip, but I feel that would be a bad idea.
For prose, I think this is one of my better bits, if not best: The girl’s green eyes widen with awe as she gazes at the iridescent, blue butterfly resting in her uncle’s hands. Kelten watches her sheer, undiluted delight, and for a moment, looking at her, he experiences it- before the usual analytical wheels in his head start turning, processing the effervescently beautiful feeling till it is no more than a fading aftertaste, irretrievable. He sighs, but only quietly within himself- he could not suddenly end or take away from the beauty of this moment for Lavena.
I have never wrote anything that I felt was good enough to save but the piece I'm working on now is going to be great, I just know it
"You don´t understand love. You have lived life full of love but that love has been normal and deserving. The love of a parent to a good child. The love from a kind and ordinary person seeking out another kind and ordinary soul to share a life with. You do not understand love in its most complex, destructive and beautiful forms. The love of the odd and frightening beings of this earth. To love and care for the snakes, spiders and maggots. The despair when you love someone who is undeserving of your love, when you continue to give all you have when you know that you will not get any in return. When the person who whispers those fateful confessions to you in sincerity is the same person who gives you the greatest pleasures in this world and the most horrifying pain. Most of all you do not know the agony of those who are perpetually unloved. Those deemed not good enough to deserve love, who live life in loneliness knowing that their most based desire, to be loved and to love, will forever go unfulfilled. No you do not understand love, your love is easy. It attaches itself to easy things. The beautiful horse and loyal dog, the acceptable wife and obedient son. You don´t know how to love in hardship, you do not know unconditional and undeserved love."
