I'm not sure if this thread is somewhere else on the forums already. If it is, feel free to merge it. I didn't find a similar thread.

What are some of your favorite bits of prose? It can be from a book, short story, movie, play, whatever.

Sometimes I find lovely writing in the strangest places.

Well, the first isn't so strange. It's from one of my favorite books - The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. If C.S. Lewis had written that book three times as long, I would have loved it even more.
On the next page she came to a spell "for the refreshment of the spirit". The pictures were fewer here but very beautiful. And what Lucy found herself reading was more like a story than a spell. It went on for three pages and before she had read to the bottom of the page she had forgotten that she was reading at all. She was living in the story as if it were real, and all the pictures were real too.
When she had got to the third page and come to the end, she said, “That is the loveliest story I've ever read or ever shall read in my whole life. Oh, I wish I could have gone on reading it for ten years. At least I'll read it over again.”
But here part of the magic of the Book came into play. You couldn't turn back. The right-hand pages, the ones ahead, could be turned; the left-hand pages could not.
“Oh, what a shame!” said Lucy. “I did so want to read it again. Well, at least I must remember it. Let's see . . . it was about . . . about . . . oh dear, it's all fading away again.
“And even this last page is going blank. This is a very queer book. How can I have forgotten? It was about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill, I know that much. But I can't remember and what shall I do?”
And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.
The prose here is unadorned and almost childlike. Even the fact that Lucy is talking to herself doesn't bother me. Lewis found a way to describe that feeling I get when I read or watch something I love without ever actually describing the feeling.

Favorite passage from The Great Gatsby:
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.

The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic – their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
Maybe I just like this one because I should. My favorite part of this is just how well it describes the strange remnants of old advertisements that seem to take on a life of their own as they fade.

And then, from an odd source. This is a monologue from a video game called Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. The person who translated this game from Japanese did an amazing job at giving one character in particular (named Strangelove) these long, impassioned speeches.
I thought she would tell me about space. The true sky, where the stars don't twinkle. But the only thing she'd speak of was Earth. Our home - as she'd seen it from space. So fleeting, so irreplaceable. I was ashamed. I'd been enamored for so long with the sky that I'd never thought to look beneath my feet... at the ground upon which I stood.
I'm not sure why I'm so in love with this quote except that it came at the end of a rather purple speech by Strangelove about the woman she had been in love with several years ago. At the end of the speech, she talks about the woman coming back from space and suddenly loses her usual pretense.

So yeah... provide your own favorites!