"In order to comprehend complicated ideas, I often need them to be broken down into bite-size pieces of information. This book helped me to grasp huge metaphysical concepts by providing manageable explanations I could wrap my head around and delve into."

"In order to comprehend complicated ideas, I often need them to be broken down into bite-size pieces of information. This book helped me to grasp huge metaphysical concepts by providing manageable explanations I could wrap my head around and delve into."

"Wildness and control are recurring themes in Phillips’s brilliant poems, and they play out too in his winding, meticulous, everywhere self-interrogating syntax. He is our metaphysical poet, using the desiring, sexual body to ask poetry’s eternal questions in distinctively contemporary ways"

"Some things in life are beyond explanation. Kieślowski reminds us that film is a spiritual and transcendent experience that taps into the metaphysical realms of our existence. Irène Jacob is absolutely mesmerizing in her portrayal of two women who are doppelgängers and share a mysterious and unspeakable bond. The experience of watching The Double Life of Véronique is ever-healing, like soaking in a warm bath surrounded by candles at night."

"One of the greatest films ever made by a director who, almost forty years after his death, is still an intimidating and disturbing figure in the history of cinema. Visconti’s films stand outside the borders of the medium, by their ambition, by their scope, uniting past and present, individuals and history, both deeply human and transcendent. The Leopard, his most translucent, towering achievement, embodies everything the best filmmaking can be, grand, profound, entertaining, physical and metaphysical, sharp as a blade and melodramatic. It stays with you, forever."

"Andrei Tarkovsky. Again, incredibly… I mean, all these films are extremely influential to my own moviemaking, and they were the kinds of movies that just spun me around. I couldn’t compare them with anything else I’d seen at the time. And Stalker was definitely one of those. There was a sense of pace that I’d never experienced in a film before, such a wonderful sustained atmosphere, and then just this incredible metaphysical story. I think it’s still one of the great science fiction movies, and it’s so philosophical and yet so visual. The philosophical ideas are conveyed in terms of pure cinema and visuals as opposed to people talking. Quite a skill, I have to say."

"This slim novel is one of the most intriguing works of literature I have come upon in a long while. Part mystery, part metaphysical journey, part fairy tale, part adult love story, it brought me to a state of the most welcome strangeness, similar to the one I sought out as a young reader of books that challenged how we perceive reality and reconstruct it in text. In the narrative’s mysterious, slow burn of a chase, a woman who has left her husband is tracked down in The Taiga, a territory where the laws of nature are as much out of joint as the rules of its isolated human society. In its uneasy atmosphere there are echoes from Tarkovsky's film Stalker as well as from golden age private eye novels."