"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
"This planet has- or rather had- a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
"And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches."
"He [Ford Prefect] struck most of the friends he made on Earth as an eccentric, but a harmless one- an unruly boozer with some oddish habits. For instance, he would often gate-crash university parties, get badly drunk and start making fun of any astrophysicists he could find till he got thrown out."
"DON'T PANIC" -from the cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
"A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have." -The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
"Here and there were a few reptiloid atomineers, two or three green sylphlike maximegalaticins, an octopodic physucturalist or two and a Hooloovoo (a Hooloovoo is a superintelligent shade of the color blue). All except the Hooloovoo were resplendant in their multicolored ceremonial lab coats; the Hooloovoo had been temporarily refracted into a free-standing prism for the occasion."
"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, as in Its a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about."
"You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy's a fun place. You'll need to have this fish in your ear." -Ford Prefect
Ford: You'd better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly like being drunk.
Arthur: What's so unpleasant about being drunk?
Ford: You ask a glass of water.
"Now it is such a bizzarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.
"The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
"'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
"'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next pedestrian crossing."
"Mostly harmless." -entry for "Earth" in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
"And yesterday the planet seemed to be going so well." -Arthur Dent
"Oh, the Paranoid Android. Yeah, we'll take him." -Zaphod Beeblebrox
"Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it." -Marvin the robot
"Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of pentunias 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."
"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much- the wheel, New York, wars and so on- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man- for precisely the same reasons."
". . . there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that if there' any real truth, it's that the entire miltidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs." -Frankie mouse
From The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another which states that this has already happened."
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it's always reality that's got it wrong.
"This was the gist of the notice. It said 'The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.'
"This has led to some interesting consequences. For instance, when the editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Traal literally (it said 'Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists' instead of 'Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists'), they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening's ultragolf."
"I just materialized out of thin air in one of your cafés as a result of an argument with the ghost of my great-grandfather. No sooner had I got there than my former self, the one that operated on my brain, popped into my head and said 'Go see Zarniwoop.' I have never heard of the cat. That is all I know. That and the fact that I've got to find the man who rules the Universe." -Zaphod
"The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.
"Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.
"For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches.
"In fact the only Oglaroonians who ever leave their tree are those who are hurled out of it for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed whether the other trees are anything other illusions brought on by eating too many Oglanuts."
"I think we were probably not very well-suited we never seemed to be happy doing the same things. We always had the greatest arguments over sex and fishing. Eventually we tried to combine the two, but that only led to disaster, as you can probably imagine." -Pizpot Gargravarr on the seperation between his voice and body
"Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet- people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insiduously, the numbers of these shoe shops were increasing. It's a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result- collapse, ruin and famine." -Pizpot Gargravarr on the destruction of Frogstar World B
"It's not so much an afterlife, more a sort of après vie." -Arthur Dent
"One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem about changing the course of history- the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
"The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Sreetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
"Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
"The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term 'Future Perfect' has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be."
Trillian: Have another drink. Enjoy yourself.
Arthur: Which? The two are mutually exclusive.
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagracka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, while the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet- or more frequently around a completely different planet.
"Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.
"Many worlds have now banned their act altogether , sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band's public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitations treaties.
"This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent."
"I can see we're all in for a fabulous evening's apocalypse!" -Max Quordlepleen
"How do you know you're having fun if there's no one watching you have it?"
"The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago . . . And that was with a coffee machine." -Marvin
"The Universe- some information to help you live in it.
1 AREA: Infinite.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of the word 'Infinite.'
Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big," time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here."
"4 POPULATION: None.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is an near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
(I suggest you also read the other definitions at the end of Chapter 19. They're pretty funny.)
"Making it up? Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it." -Marvin
"I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg."
-Anti-Teleportaion Protest song
(Read the stuff about gin and tonic and structural linguistics in the middle of Chapter 24.)
"Number Two's eyes narrowed and became what are known in the Shouting and Killing People trade as cold slits, the idea presumably being to give your opponent the impression that you have lost your glasses or are having difficulty keeping awake. Why this is frightening is an, as yet, unresolved problem."
"In an infinite Universe anything can happen. Even survival. Strange but true." -Ford
"The major problem- one of the major problems, for there are several- one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
"To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
"All evidence is circumstantial." -the ruler of the Universe
"You're very sure of your facts. I couldn't trust the thinking of a man who takes the Universe- if there is one- for granted. I only decide about my Universe. My Universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay." -the ruler of the Universe
"It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their eyes and ears." -the ruler of the Universe
"Look at it this way, fruit and berries on strange planets either make you live or make you die. Therefore the point at which to start toying with them is when you're going to die if you don't. That way you stay ahead. The secret of healthy hitchhiking is to eat junk food." -Ford
"He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant privet bush where it hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and didn't stop till it was set upon and eaten by a fox which choked on one of its bones and died on the bank of a stream which subsequently washed it away.
"During the following weeks Ford Prefect swallowed his pride and struck up a relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on Golgafrincham, and he was terribly upset when she suddenly passed away as a result of drinking water from a pool that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox. The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the letter Q into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable."
"No, I'm very ordinary, but some very strange things have happened to me. You could say I'm more differed from then differing." -Arthur
No more Douglas Adams quotes from me! I just recommend you read the rest of the Hitchhiker series yourself.
