"Reading Proust is not like reading any other book: it is like having another life alongside one’s ordinary one. I read it every day for ten years. The miracle and mystery of consciousness, the tricks that memory plays, the gifts and thefts of time, the exhausting and exhilarating never completed task of perception: no one has come so close in capturing these"

"I love this movie and always have! And now I get to love it more on this far-out DVD package. Until watching the accompanying doc, I had never really thought of the film as a 1970s American Graffiti—for me, the fun of it is in the ensemble cast of young people, many of whom became huge stars later—it reminds me more of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But also on this doc is an extraordinarily frank look at the difficulties of making this film. People in the movie business—indie or otherwise—are rarely this honest in discussing what it took to get the film you see on the screen. I really appreciated the honesty of Jim Jacks and Richard Linklater, who, uh, shall we say, didn’t always agree on the set. Also, the interviews with the young actors, like Marissa Ribisi, talking about the approach Linklater took with them, were completely enlightening. I plan to steal his entire approach from now on. :) And the packaging is an artifact to have for keeps: the cover artwork by Marc English, based on the Led Zeppelin III album cover, is supremely inspired, and the booklet is a high school notebook. It’s great pop culture folk art! I own a collection of Memoryware folk art that people used to make with all their leftover trinkets and little pieces of their lives: earrings, coins, buttons, etc. They’d take these mementos and put them in plaster on top of an old jug or jar and call them “memory jugs” or “memory jars.” And this is what this DVD is for me—a keepsake. A memory jar of seventies pop culture. No, of 1976. No, of specifically 1976 Austin, Texas. And yet . . . it’s a memory jug of anyone’s last high school rite."

"Cinema is most often analogized with dreaming (see Hollywood as “dream factory”), but it is also a kind of remembering: it manufactures an immediate past, and thus makes us retrospectively and prospectively older. Bergman’s Wild Strawberries starts with a dream and ends with a memory, aligning its beauty with the beauty of its seventy-seven-year-old star, the great Swedish actor and director Victor Sjöström."

"Because I lived in the country during the war, I saw films for the first time in London circa 1945/1946 . . . I saw Nanook of the North and The River around this time and both left distinct images in my memory. But, in common with many other girls at the time and, indeed, ever since, I would choose The Red Shoes as my first formative film."

"I was so excited by the news of this incredible release and restoration. Every moment is beautiful—as, of course, is the soundtrack by Ravi Shankar. Some scenes even seem to be able to penetrate the boundary of your own personal memory. Electrifying but peaceful. Throughout the entire trilogy, everything is leaving Apu behind, but the final scene shows all currents flooding home to him."