Words that give you pause

[Prof. Tarma Amelia Black]

I just read something in Madam, Will You Talk by Mary Stewart and I literally stopped reading, it was so evocative and gorgeous, so beautiful ...

It was still hot, and the late sun's rays fell obliquely across the balcony, through the half-opened shutter, in a shaft of copper-gold. Motionless, the shadows of thin leaves traces a pattern across it as delicate and precise as a Chinese painting on silk. The image of the tree, brushed in like that by the sun, had a grace that the tree itself gave no hint of, for it was merely one of the nameless spindly affairs, parched and dust-laden, that struggled up toward the sky from their pots in the hotel court below. But its shadow might have been designed by Ma Yüan.

Have you ever read something which is so beautifully written that you put the book down for a moment and savour it? Tell us about it!