"I first read this when I was a young girl, way before I had ever had any real romance of my own.... but Kathy’s speech to her maid Nellie about her love for Heathcliff always stayed with me: “Nelly, I AM Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more then I am always a pleasure to myself—but, as my own being.” It’s still for me the most passionate and fatalistic novel about romantic love."

"The music is so beautiful, and the people are so beautiful. I first saw this as a very young kid, and I just remember being captivated by the sensuality of the story and those moments with everyone dancing in the street. This movie opened up my world—I’d never seen black people’s lives portrayed in such an artistic, almost New Wave-y style. And I don’t know if I’d ever seen a film about black people that was this romantic."

"This is not just because the movie has an ampersand in it like Amira & Sam. Even still, an off-color romantic comedy — it’s a comedy, but off-color because of the older woman and a younger man. It’s still something that movie artists don’t touch on and it’s not an impossible scenario. It’s one of those things that is difficult to get right, and Hal Ashby told such an amazing story of friendship and caring and love and fun and life."

"The zenith for both Pabst and star Louise Brooks—the latter has become almost solely emblematic of the flapper age because of this film! Adapted from playwright Franz Wedekind’s story of Lulu, a preternaturally powerful beauty blithely strolling through the mating marshlands of the world, where nature is savagely cruel to both the pursuers and the pursued. Watch this film at different stages of your romantic life span and behold your sympathies shifting all over the place! Ouch! Gorgeous! Ouch, again!"

"This is the finest movie ever made about art and the romantic choices made by artists. I blame it only for the total crap it’s spawned on the same subject, some very recent. It’s almost too beautiful and too heartbreaking to think about, which only makes me want to stop typing and see it again. I know nothing about ballet or cinematography, but even I can tell when a movie is not merely a movie but an indelible imagination tattoo."

"Want a thousand pages of pure romantic anxiety in which the biggest war in our nation’s history is just a mere backdrop for the heartache of a woman who should probably be in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous? Then this is the book for you! I loved the descriptions of food when I was younger, and also of fashion and French kissing, and it’s a real master class in plot, pacing and how to sew a dress out of window decorations!"

"I have always been drawn to fiction that is written in sublime language and looks at the world through a romantic-realist lens, and this book does just that. It is the story of a White family in New Orleans, in the American South, and their Black servant; a story of race and love and family and dreams. It is filled with longing, melancholy and nostalgia, and it is so atmospheric, so hauntingly described, that the reader never quite emerges from the book."