Wong Kar-wai

when the couple is walking together, the camera will somewhat perversely continue to remain on their midsection rather than, more conventionally, panning up to their faces as quickly as possible to preserve normal framing

there anything in the world that doesn't have an expiry date? If memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates? If so, I hope they last for centuries.

Memory, once again, becomes the means by which we organize time and our very subjectivity itself.

youthful, perhaps naive, enthusiasm to discover what's on “the other side of the mountain” and Ouyang's own world-weary pessimism. At first, Ouyang indicates that Hong's impulse will always be futile, and the film seems to agree with him, since what has been abandoned always turns out to be exactly what was being sought in the first place. Yet Ouyang also comes to understand that it is this irrepressible desire itself, perhaps because it is naive, that gives meaning to life and that must be indulged if one is to be anything but an empty shell. “Once I could have been like Hong, but I failed,” he tells us bitterly.

And memory is actually about a sense of loss—always a very important element in drama

the present is always already gone as soon as we begin to look for it

Tsui gets another thing right when he says that “in Wong's case particularly, form is the essence of his films—it is, in many ways, the narrative of his work…. It's not a case of style over substance; rather, it's style as substance” (9

the momentary heartbreak of glimpsing a stranger who might be interesting to love

the mood always seems both unspecifiable and exact at the same time

I believe that music—and sound in general—is a crucial feature of these films that actually “activates” much of what is visually brilliant in them.