The Grand Hotel Quotes & Sayings

Was a dead Vietnamese in civilian clothes part of the enemy forces? Officers started to make up numbers to give their superiors the body count they wanted. — Michael Barone

He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another.
Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have liked to see of his work, paintings in what an English art journal which lay about on the reading-room table in the Grand Hotel called his first and second manners, the mythological manner and the manner in which he shewed signs of Japanese influence, both admirably exemplified, the article said, in the collection of Mme. de Guermantes. Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here, at Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. — Marcel Proust

I saw 'The Grand Budapest Hotel.' I liked it. I saw 'The Fault in Our Stars,' and I could see why young girls like it. But it dropped off like crazy in the second weekend. I liked 'Fed Up' - I love documentaries. I go to a lot of documentaries. — Rob Reiner

I will be thirty years old again in thirty seconds. I will take the best room in the Grand Central or the Orndorff Hotel. I will dine on oysters and palomitas and wash them down with white wine. Then I will go to the Acme or Keating's or the Big Gold Bar and sit down and draw my cards and fill an inside straight and win myself a thousand dollars. Then I will go to the Red Light or the Monte Carlo and dance the floor afire. Then I will go to a parlor house and have them top up a bathtub with French champagne and I will strip and dive into it with a bare-assed blonde and a redhead and an octoroon and the four of us will get completely presoginated and laugh and let long bubbly farts at hell and baptize each other in the name of the Trick, the Prick, and the Piper-Heidsick. — Glendon Swarthout

The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand. — William Least Heat-Moon

A jet plane cannot mow the lawn, but it can fly to distant destinations. Don't worry so much about what you can't do; just do what you can as only you can do it. — Dan Millman

If you start watching the oldies, you're in trouble. I feel ancient if "Grand Hotel" or "The Bride Wore Red" comes on. I have a sneaking regard for "Mildred Pierce", but the others do nothing for me. — Joan Crawford

Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed. — Patrick White

Zen perceives and feels, and does not abstract and meditate. Zen penetrates and is finally lost in the immersion. Meditation, on the other hand, is outspokenly dualistic and consequently inevitably superficial. — D.T. Suzuki

Nature's Grand Hotel has its Season, like the others. As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table-d'hote shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal; as suites of rooms are closed, carpets taken up, and waiters sent away; those boarders who are staying on, en pension, until the next year's full re-opening, cannot help being somewhat affected by all these flittings and farewells, this eager discussion of plans, routes, and fresh quarters, this daily shrinkage in the stream of comradeship. — Kenneth Grahame

It is June 27, 1912. You are lying in your bed in the Grand Hotel and it is 6 p.m. on the evening of June 27, 1912. Your mind accepts this absolutely. 6 p.m. on June 27, 1912. Elise McKenna is in this hotel at this very moment. Her manager, William Fawcett Robinson, is in this hotel at this very moment. Now, this moment, here. Both in the Grand Hotel on this evening of June 27, 1912. 6 p.m. on June 27, 1912. Elise McKenna, now, in this hotel. She and her company are in this hotel at this very moment. Now on June 27, 1912, 6 p.m. Your mind accepts this, absolutely. You have traveled back in time, soon you will open your eyes. You will walk into the corridor, and you will go downstairs and you will find Elise McKenna, who is in this hotel at this very moment. — Richard Matheson

For hitter or pitcher, rookie or veteran, baseball has long been defined by failure rather than success, the old a-.300-hitter-gets-out-7-times-in-10-at-bats truism. Dealing with and managing failure is an essential - some would say the essential - part of the job description. — Barry Svrluga

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) — Wes Anderson

In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. — Theodore Roosevelt

When you come to a hotel room, you want it to be grand, functional and beautiful. But you don't want things that are not useful. Sometimes you go to hotels and there are all these frames and pictures of people you don't know, and you end up hiding everything in the drawer, and then housekeeping come and put it out again. — Diane Von Furstenberg

But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally correct. — Charles Dickens

It was the single best sexual encounter I've ever had. We were in the Soho Grand Hotel, and there was a mirror, and I was like, 'Oh my God, you're banging the girl of your dreams and you're watching it right now.' — Pete Wentz

They stood by the open window of their hotel room with the rain sweeping into their faces. A bolt of lightning lit up the Grand Canal. Struck it out of the darkness in a searing eloquent flash. The expectation was that the night to come would be no less bracing, no less eloquent. — Glenn Haybittle

'The Grand Budapest Hotel' is not really my thing, but I kind of loved it. — Quentin Tarantino