A pal asked me what my favourite sentence was in English.

I wasted eight minutes finding it in google.

There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave : there are no voices, O Rhodope ! that are not soon mute, however tuneful : there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last. (Landor.)  

 Quoted of course in '84, Charing Cross Rd', that enchanting play, then book and then film. 


My friend shocked me by asking who Landor was. Really, the world is becoming very philistine. Walter Savage Landor, he who threw his cook out of a first floor window into the garden below and then said, 'Oh God I forgot the daffodils.' 


Two more favourite sentences:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion. Troilus and Cressida

Life affords no human felicity more acute than that of a bishop from the Western United States when at a London dinner party he hears himself addressed for the first time as 'My Lord.'  

G.W.E. Russell