I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Can’t stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I’ll tell them what to do. Don’t get bitten in the first place. (quoting Dr. Struan Sutherland)
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.
I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?
My capacity for happiness, he added, you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first
And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before–and thus was the Empire forged.
But what about the End of the Universe? We’ll miss the big moment.I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish, said Zaphod,nothing but a gnab gib.A what?Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let’s get zappy.
The first ten million years were the worst, said Marvin, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.
Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was.Is there any tea on this spaceship? he asked.
He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. “I will go mad!” he annouced.
Exactly!” said Deep Thought. “So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.
Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.
This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
So this is it, said Arthur, We are going to die.Yes, said Ford, except… no! Wait a minute! He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision. What’s this switch? he cried.What? Where? cried Arthur, twisting round.No, I was only fooling, said Ford, we are going to die after all.
What’s up? [asked Ford.]I don’t know, said Marvin, I’ve never been there.
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
I have detected disturbances in the wash.”The wash?”The space-time wash.”Are we talking about some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?”Eddies in the space-time continuum.”Ah…is he. Is he.”What?”Er, who is Eddy, then, exactly?
Exactly! said Deep Thought. So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.
Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.
But unless we determine to take action,’ said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, ‘then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care about that?’ ‘Not enough to want to get killed over it,’ said Ford.