The two most beautiful words in the English language are [Mohorovičić discontinuity](Mohorovičić discontinuity).
*Lo-lee-ta. *
(What? Someone had to.)
My nominations:
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[li]Endoplasmic reticulum[/li][/ul]
If the phrases don’t necessarily have to be divorced of their meanings, Nabokov’s writing is a veritable treasure house of these.
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[li]Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive.[/li][li]A poem begins (and it only begins): Ada, our ardors and arbors…[/li][li]The rhythm of the two last phrases: We all have such fateful objects — it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another — carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane’s heart always break.[/li][/ul]
ee cummings’ stuff (because lord knows what the hell his lines mean):
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[li]“anyone lived in a pretty how town”[/li][li]"I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens/Only the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses[/li][/ul]
Othello - something about Desdemona’s skin being:
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smooth as monumental alabaster
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That…that is a good name. moxoroʋitʃitɕ.
(Your link’s broken, by the way.)
Elberëth Gilthoniel, silivren penna miriël!
(Elberëth Starkindler, white-glittering, slanting down sparkling like a jewel)
Indeed.
Most of the examples in this thread are terrible, terrible examples (all IMHO of course), more people trying to show how well read/intelligent they perceive themselves to be than anything else.
From just the OP, “The Heretic Archivist of the Gethsemane Reclussium” is comically bad.
Poe is a master of this. “And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.”
That reminds me of newly canonized Native American saint Kateri Tekakwitha.
I don’t play Minecraft, but that was what I came in here to post. Weird.
<SLAPS Jimmy Chitwood WITH A WET TROUT>
I’ve always liked the sound of Kiri Te Kanawa. Sort of trips prettily on the tongue and teeth.
Berencereth Cumdumpster.
Come lay your bones on the alabaster stones.
Divine Endurance - the title of a novel I never read, but the title stuck with me. It’s the name of a cat in it I believe.
Raghunath Rao - the name of a character in the Belisarius alt-history series. His nicknames, “The Wind of the Great Country” and “The Panther of Maharashtra” are good too.
“The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face” (Dylan, “Visions of Johanna”). Not the pure sound of the words so much, but the way the ideas bump up against one another.
Perhaps more to the point, I’m always delighted by song lyrics that work as pure sound. In that category it’s hard to beat “Little old lady got mutilated late last night” from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London”.
Richard III: “Foes of my rest and my sweet sleep’s disturbers.” (It continues “are they that I would have the act upon,” but that’s not as pretty.)
I remember seeing a phrase describing waking, “as the sweet liquor of sleep drained away”. Not able to source it, though.
“…I sang in my chains like the sea” - phrase from Dylan Thomas’ poem “Fern Hill”. sounds lovely; who the heck knows what it means.
I’m not sure this is exactly what you’re looking for, but there’s a phrase from Peter Straub’s Ghost Story that I’ve remembered long after I forgot what the book was about.
"Long ago when we all lived in the woods and no one lived anywhere else."
Read a few of his books after that hoping for equally magic phrasing, but nope, just moderately well-written horror fiction.