"It has a strange beauty about it. It has a deceptively simple story. It has all the classic trademarks of someone who introduces you to a special, magical world, and yet you are able to then see your own world completely differently. There’s always something slightly uncanny about what Powell and Pressburger did — if you think about The Red Shoes or The Tales of Hoffman, and things later like Peeping Tom, films like that. They’re just extraordinary."

"Beauty and the Beast may be tenuous and delicate where Eyes Without a Face is overripe and pulpish, but these films are gorgeous, dark poems about fragility and horror. Both fables depend on sublime, almost ethereal, imagery to convey a sense of doom and loss: mad, fragile love clinging for dear life in a maelstrom of darkness. The clash of haunting and enchanting imagery has seldom been more powerful. Eyes Without a Face boasts an extraordinary soundtrack too!"

"Beauty and the Beast may be tenuous and delicate where Eyes Without a Face is overripe and pulpish, but these films are gorgeous, dark poems about fragility and horror. Both fables depend on sublime, almost ethereal, imagery to convey a sense of doom and loss: mad, fragile love clinging for dear life in a maelstrom of darkness. The clash of haunting and enchanting imagery has seldom been more powerful. Eyes Without a Face boasts an extraordinary soundtrack too!"

"Yep. A symphony of visuals comes together to communicate the essence of basic humanity. There’s no suitable combination of words to match the combination of cinematic choices that Kurosawa made here. I was lucky enough to see it on film the first time I saw it, on a big screen, with good sound, sitting next to my wife, who was also seeing it for the first time. That’s a combination of beauty that’s hard to replicate."

"I read the great American “East of Eden,” strangely enough, during my first rail trip across Europe. After I completed each chapter I would rip the pages in a chunk from my paper back and leave them in whatever train car I was departing to lighten my load. There was something very comforting having something so American with me while being so far from home. The beauty of Steinbeck's language stays with you for years if not decades."

"The breathtaking beauty of Alameddine’s prose alone makes this compulsive reading. Its true genius, however, lies in the sacrosanct ideas that the narrator—a translator of books that will never be read—lays bare with humorous irreverence, wry insouciance, or intellectual outrage. She is fearless in looking at aging and death, the morality of war and survival, and the true meaning of a meaningful life. She also gives advice on not dying your hair blue in bad light."

"It’d be good to be reminded, as I pass my days sitting on a beach under a coconut tree, of all the life, all the beauty and sorrow, all the mystery; all that can be contained within a relatively modest number of pages. It’d be good to be continually reminded, as I grew older, about how much rampant life, how much emotion and conflict and joy and disappointment, can be conveyed in a novel so perfectly, symmetrically structured."