Grand Budapest Hotel Quotes

You see? There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant - (sighs deeply). Oh, fuck it. -M. Gustave, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

MR. MOUSTAFA There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once know as humanity... He was one of them. What more is there to say?

(Mr. Moustafa) I think his world ended long before he even entered it. Although I must say, he certainly maintained the illusion with a marvelous grace.

When I first started hearing about the places that give people joy, I realized that many of them evoke this giddy feeling of abundance: carnivals and circuses, dollar stores and flea markets, and giant old hotels like the Grand Budapest of director Wes Anderson’s imagining. The same feeling also exists on a smaller scale. An ice-cream cone covered in rainbow sprinkles is like a candy store held in your hand. A shower of confetti, a multicolored quilt, a simple game of pick-up sticks, have this irresistible allure. Even the language of joy is rife with excess. We say we’re overjoyed or that we’re brimming with happiness. We say, “My cup runneth over.” And this is very much how it feels to be in a moment of joy, when our delight is so abundant it feels like it can’t be contained by the boundaries of our bodies.

Because, if there's one thing we've learned from penny dreadfuls, it's that when you find yourself in a place like this, you must never be a candy ass; you've got to prove yourself from day one. You've got to win their respect.

We realize that all these acts of self-reinvention and self-determination will nonetheless be trampled by the greedy and the powerful, then ground up in the tank treads of history.

You see? There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant - (sighs deeply). Oh, fuck it.

By that I mean: In this movie, there’s violence, there’s war, but there is no sense of innocence, at least not in the way that Americans use the word “innocence,” as in “that thing that we’re constantly losing every decade throughout our history.” There is no innocence in this movie. There’s sweetness and kindness, but that’s not the same thing as innocence. These are tough people. When we hear that war is imminent, your characters don’t seem terribly shocked. It’s like, “Oh, OK—well, I guess we’ll have to get ready for that.” There is a sense that this is not the first time something like this has happened. War is something these people recognize as a part of life. The movie is a comedy, and yet there’s a sense of history and suffering.

The past that Zweig eulogized was the moribund twilight of European high culture and human goodness. It was an innocence that was forever lost.