"I watched Winter Light for the first time when I was working my way through a depression. The pastor’s crisis of faith eerily reflected my own disillusionment with the world around me. It kind of felt like looking into a broken mirror."

"It was hard to pick just one Bergman film—so many brilliant choices. I suppose I picked Winter Light because it is so perfectly bleak, the very essence of the frozen grayness of winter. This is one of Bergman’s famous “God’s silence” films. The dilemma of Pastor Ericsson’s trying to find meaning in a godless universe (or at least a universe where God will not answer) is hard to watch without personally taking on his existential dread. Bergman never blinks. He doesn’t hand us any easy answers or life-affirming reassurances. It’s grim. A great work of art."

"I found this in winter 2009 in Chicago while riding the train to work at 6 a.m. to open a cafe, depressed. I didn't have money to buy recording gear. It's so undeniably real and unafraid to be sincere. To me, that is powerful songwriting."

"If I were allowed two books, I would pair this one with The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. I could spend a whole fall and winter just going back and forth between Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and Strand's "Dark Harbor.""