Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
35 quotes
"Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is."(Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)"
"Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means."
"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."
"Arthur: If I asked you where the hell we were, would I regret it?Ford: We're safe.Arthur: Oh good.Ford: We're in a small galley cabin in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet. that I wasn't previously aware of."
"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."
"My capacity for happiness," he added, "you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first"
"In the center lay the exploded carcass of a lonely sperm whale that hadn't lived long enough to be disappointed with its lot."
"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."
"The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules"
"A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?""Ask a glass of water!"
"But the plans were on display…”“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”“That’s the display department.”“With a flashlight.”“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”“So had the stairs.”“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard."
"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."
"A five-week sand blizzard?" said Deep Thought haughtily. "You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
"So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed.The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy."
"They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters."
"And I write novels!" chimed in the other cop. "Though I haven't had any of them published yet, so I better warn you, I'm in a meeeean mood!"
"Don't blame you," said Marvin and counted five hundred and ninety-seven thousand million sheep before falling asleep again a second later."
"How many roads must a man walk down?"
"When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for the planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying."
"Howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl slurrp uuuurgh should have a good time. Message repeats."
"The Googleplex Star Thinker is a super-computer from the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity and has the ability to calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle during a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard.The Deep Thought computer call it a pocket calculator in comparison to itself."
"You barbarians!' he yelled. 'I'll sue the council for every penny it's got! I'll have you hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled...until...until...until...until you've had enough.'Ford was running after him. Very very fast.'And then I will do it again!' yelled Arthur, 'And when I've finished I will take all the little bits, and I will jump on them!"
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
"It faintly irritated him that Zaphod had to impose some ludicrous fantasy on to the scene to make it work for him. All this Margrathea nonsense seemed juvenile. Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"