Excerpts from The Guide
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Here are some of of the best quotes from the greatest (in my opinion) science fiction humor book (a series of 5 books).
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of
the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small
unregarded yellow sun. Orbitting 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..."
"Eight years ago, at lunchtime, this planet had been demolished, utterly
destroyed, by the huge yellow Vogon ships which had hung in the lunchtime sky
as if the law of gravity was no more than a local regulation, and breaking it
no more than just a parking offense."
"The thing that used to worry
him most was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was looking so
worried about."
"This must be a Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his
beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
"How do you feel?' he asked him.
'Like a military academy,' said Arthur, 'bits of me keep passing out."
"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."
"Arthur slapped his arms about himself to try and get his circulation a little
more enthusiastic about its job."
Mostly Harmless
"Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something
else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though."
"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 It's 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?"
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
"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
exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working."
"You'd better prepare yourself for the jump into hyperspace. It's
unpleasantly like being drunk.'
'What's so unpleasant about being drunk?'
'You ask a glass of water."
"Something extraordinary happened to Ford's face. At least five entirely
separate and distinct expressions of shock and amazement piled up on it in a
jumbled mess."
"Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers."
After an initial flurry of opening hellos, he and Russel--the wonderful girl's
brother's name was Russell, a name which to Arthur's mind always suggested
burly men with blond mustaches and blow-dried hair who would at the slightest
provocation start wearing velvet tuxedos and frilly shirt fronts and would then
have to be forcibly restrained from commentating on billiards matches--had
quickly discovered they didn't like each other at all.
It was a stupid dog, but it should at least have been able to recognize Arthur
instead of standing there, hackles raised, as if Arthur were the most fearful
apparition ever to intrude upon its feeble-witted life.
This prompted Arthur to go and peer at the window again, this time with an eye
not for the asphyxiating emu but for himself.
Seeing himself for the first time suddenly in a familiar context, he had to
admit that the dog had a point.
Arthur reached for the bedside light, not expecting it to come on. To his
surprise, it did. This appealed to Arthur's sense of logic. Since the
Electricity Board had cut him off without fail every time he paid his bill, it
seemed only reasonable that they would leave him connected when he hadn't.
Sending them money obviously only drew attention to himself.
The room was much as he had left it, festeringly untidy, though the effect was
muted a little by a thick layer of dust. Half-read books and magazines nestled
among piles of half-used towels. Half-pairs of socks reclined in half-drunk
cups of coffee. What once had been a half-eaten sandwich had now half-turned
into something that Arthur didn't entirely want to know about. Bung a fork of
lightning through this lot, he thought to himself, and you'd start the
evolution of life off all over again.
His rosebushes were carefully tended, pruned back for the winter, strapped to
canes and labeled, and Arthur wondered what he was doing above them. He
wondered what was holding him there, and when he discovered that nothing was
holding him there he crashed awkwardly to the ground.
He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put
them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no
attempt to move within that time, he called them breakfast and ate them.
Between them they killed a virulent space disease he'd picked up without
knowing it in the Flargathon Gas Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise
would have killed off half the population of the Western Hemisphere, blinded
the other half, and driven everyone else psychotic and sterile, so the Earth
was lucky there.
He looked swayingly around at his audience, and could not help but be aware of
an air of skepticism about their jumbled faces.
He felt very affronted by this.
"How else," he demanded, "could I afford to have my face dropped?"
Friendly arms began to help him home. "Listen," he protested, as the cold
February breeze brushed his face, "looking lived-in is all the rage in
California at the moment. You've got to look as if you've seen the Galaxy.
Life, I mean. You've got to look as if you've seen life. That's what I got. A
face drop. Give me eight years, I said. I hope being thirty doesn't come back
into fashion or I've wasted a lot of money."
For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone for
long enough with a Swiss cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained
revelation.
"I know," she said. "I shall have to remember," she added, "that you are the
sort of person who cannot hold on to a simple piece of paper for two minutes
without winning a raffle with it."
"When I eat a biscuit," said Arthur, "it stays eaten."
The air seemed to stand still around them, waiting. Arthur wished that the air
would go away and mind its own business.
He had long ago realized that the only way of being in Ford's company
successfully was to keep a large stock of very placid faces and wear them at
all times.
Arthur Dent had been in some hell holes in his life, but he had never before
seen a spaceport that had a sign saying "Even traveling despondently is better
than arriving here."
Arthur felt at a bit of a loss. There was a whole galaxy of stuff out there for
him, and he wondered if it was churlish of him to complain to himself that it
lacked just two things: the world he was born on and the woman he loved.
"Well there's probably a lot you don't know about me," said Arthur. "Come to
mention it, there's probably a lot I don't know about me either."
"O Sandwich Maker from Bob!" he pronounced. He paused, furrowed his brow and
sighed as he closed his eyes in pious contemplation. "Life," he said, "will be
a great deal less weird without you!"
"Is there stuff going on here that I don't know about?" said Arthur to Ford.
"Isn't there usually?" said Ford.
"Arthur's first sensations of hope and trepidation had instantly been
overwhelmed by astonishment, and all sorts of thoughts were battling for the
use of his vocal cords at the moment."
"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 beard. He spread his
arms out wide.
'I will go mad!' he announced."
"Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working
out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would
go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the
fields of prehistoric Earth."
"Fine,' said Arthur, and his consciousness stepped out again for a quick
breather. His body flopped back on the grass."
"His face froze for a second of two and then began to do that terribly slow
crashing trick that Arctic ice floes do spectacularly well in the spring."
"Arthur had adopted his normal crisis role, which was to stand with his mouth
hanging open and let it all wash over him."
"Arthur lay in startled stillness on the acceleration couch. He wasn't certain
whether he had just got space-sickness or religion."
"Arthur nodded wisely to himself. After a while he realized that this wasn't
getting him anywhere and decided that he would say 'What?' after all."
"He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of himself to
see where he might be hurt. Wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain.
After a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that
was hurting."
"Ah,' effervesced the little man, 'and did you have a wonderful time?'
Arthur started to choke violently on his drink.
'What a wonderfully exciting cough, 'said the little man, quite startled by it,
'do you mind if I join you?'
And with that he launched into the most extraordinary and spectacular fit of
coughing that caught Arthur so much by surprise that he started to choke
violently, discovered that he was already doing it and got thoroughly confused.
Together they performed a lung-busting duet that went on for fully two minutes
before Arthur managed to cough and splutter to a halt."
"Well, so am I alive, aren't I?' retaliated Arthur, haggard with adventure and
anger. His eyebrows were leaping up and down as if they wanted to punch each
other."
"His fingers fumbled to release the safety catch and engage the extreme danger
catch as Ford had shown him. He was shaking so much that if he'd fired at
anybody at that moment he probably would have burned his signature on them."
"Arthur yawed wildly as his skin tried to jump one way and his skeleton the
other, while his brain tried to work out which of his ears it most wanted to
crawl out of."
"Bet you weren't expecting to see me again,' said the monster, which Arthur
couldn't help thinking was a strange remark for it to make, seeing that he had
never met the creature before. He could tell that he hadn't met the creature
before from the simple fact that he was able to sleep at nights."
"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was
a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."
How to Leave the Planet:
1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it's very
important that you get away as soon as possible.
2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White
House-(202) 456-1414-to have a word in on your behalf with the guys at NASA.
3. If you don't have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the
overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051.) They don't have any friends there
either (at least, none to speak of,) but they do seem to have a little
influence, so you may as well try.
4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is
011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible.
5. 5. If all of these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and
explain that it's vitally important you get away before your phone bill
arrives.
-- The Book
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, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck
about in the water having a good time. But conversely the
dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for
precisely the same reasons.
-- The Book
"`Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.'
`Very deep,' said Arthur, `you should send that in to the "Reader's Digest".
They've got a page for people like you.'"
-- Ford convincing Arthur to drink three pints in ten minutes at lunchtime.
"`You know,' said Arthur, `it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon
airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die from asphyxiation in deep
space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was
young.'
`Why, what did she tell you?'
`I don't know, I didn't listen.'"
-- Arthur coping with certain death as best as he could.
"`Incidentally,' he said, `what does teleport mean?'
Another moment passed.
Slowly, the others turned to face him.
`Probably the wrong moment to ask,' said Arthur, `It's just I remember you use
the word a short while ago and I only bring it up because...'
`Where,' said Ford quietly, `does it say teleport?'
`Well, just over here in fact,' said Arthur, pointing at a dark control box in
the rear of the cabin, `Just under the word "emergency", above the word
"system" and beside the sign saying "out of order".'"
-- Arthur finding an escape route from a certain death situation.
"`How do you feel?' he asked him.
`Like a military academy,' said Arthur, `bits of me keep passing out.'" ....
`We're safe,' he said.
`Oh good,' said Arthur.
`We're in a small galley cabin,' said Ford, `in one of the spaceships of the
Vogon Constructor Fleet.'
`Ah,' said Arthur, `this is obviously some strange usage of the word "safe"
that I wasn't previously aware of.'
-- Arthur after his first ever teleport ride.
"`If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and
shot now.'"
-- Zaphod.
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very
angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
-- The Book just racapping what happened in the previous book in the series.
"The fronting for the eighty-yard long marble-topped bar had been made by
stitching together nearly twenty thousand Antarean Mosaic Lizard skins, despite
the fact that the twenty thousand lizards concerned had needed them to keep
their insides in."
-- The Book decribing Milliways' politically incorrect decor.
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that
cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong
goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
-- One of the laws of computers and programming revealed.
"`A curse,' said Slartibartfast, `which will engulf the Galaxy in fire and
destruction, and possibly bring the Universe to a premature doom. I mean it,'
he added.
`Sounds like a bad time,' said Ford, `with luck I'll be drunk enough not to
notice.'"
-- Ford ensuring everyone knew where his priorities lay.
"`My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural
deficiency in moral fibre, and that I am therefore excused from saving
Universes.'"
-- Ford's last ditch attempt to get out of helping Slartibartfast.
"`That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life
forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid
meeting.'"
-- Marvin's first ever compliment about anybody.
"Mark turned and asked a pasenger behind us if these planes ever crashed. Oh
yes, he was told, but not to worry - there hadn't been a serious crash now in
months."
-- Mark being reassured of Bali airline safety.
"Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a
lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and
a bottle of tequila."
-- A brief resume of the career of a record company magnate.
Highlights from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with
digital watches.
"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'."
"I'd trust him to the end of the end of the Earth." "And how
far is that?" "About 12 minutes away."
"Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who
really knows where his towel is."
Humans have a habit of continually stating and repeating the
very very obvious as in "It's a nice day" or "You are very tall" or "Oh dear,
you seem to have fallen down a thirty foot well, are you all right?"
"The best way to irritate a Vogon is to feed his grandmother
to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal."
"You'll need to have a fish in your ear."
"Well, if we're lucky its just the Vogons come to throw us
out into space." "And if we're unlucky?" "The captain might be serious in his
threat to read us some of his poetry first."
During a poetry reading of "Ode to a Small Lump of Green
Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning", by Poet Master Grunthos the
Flatuent, four audience members died of internal hemorrhaging and the President
of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing his own legs off.
As he was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled "My
Favorite Bathtime Gurgles", his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to
save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled
his brain.
The prisoners sat in Poetry Appreciation Chairs-strapped in.
"My aunt said that spaceship guard was a good career for a
young Vogon-you know, the uniform, the low-slung stun ray holster, the mindless
tedium."
"Space is big. Really big. You won't believe how vastly
hugely mind-boggingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the
road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
"The fabulously beautiful planet of Bethselamin is now so
worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion tourists a year that any
net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on
the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave so every
time you go to the lavatory there it is vitally important to get a receipt."
"But that's not the point! The point is that I'm a perfectly
safe penguin and my colleague here is rapidly running out of limbs!"
"There's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to
talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out!"
The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation
defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With".
"All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny
disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you and their satisfaction to
close again with the satisfaction with the knowledge of a job well-done"."Thank
you for making a simple door very happy."
"Please call me Eddie if it will help you relax," said the
computer.
The deadly missile attack resulted in the untimely creation
and sudden demise of a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale..A
shortened record of the thoughts of the sperm whale from creation to death is
as follows. "Ah.! What is happening? Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Wow!
This is really exciting.so much to look forward to! And wow! What is this thing
suddenly coming towards me very fast? It needs a name.ground! I wonder if it
will be friends with me?" This was followed y a sudden wet thud. 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.
Somewhere in the cosmos there was a planet entirely given over
to ball-point life-forms.
There was an old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was
true, although he was later discovered to be lying.
Man had always assumed he was more intelligent than dolphins
because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars, etc. while all the
dolphins had ever done was muck around in the water having a good time
Conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more
intelligent for precisely the same reasons. The dolphins had long known of the
impending destruction of the planet Earth and had tried to alert mankind of the
danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing
attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up
and left Earth by their own means before the Vogons arrived. The last ever
dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to
do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the
"Star-Spangled Banner", but in fact the message was "So long and thanks for all
the fish".
The only species on Earth more intelligent than dolphins spent
a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside
wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man.
"When we tried to revive our cleaning staff we discovered
they'd been dead for nearly thirty thousand years."
"The last planet was knee-deep in fish."
"If I ever meet myself, I'll hit myself so hard, I won't know what's hit me."
"Nothing at all, not an electric sausage."
"Here, suck this," said Roosta, offering Zaphod his towel.
The Jatravartid people of Viltvodle IV believe that the entire
Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green
Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they
call the Coming of the Great White Hankercheif, are small blue creatures with
more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in
history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
*The average Vogon would not think twice before doing
something so pointlessly hideous to you that you will wish you had never been
born (or if you are a clearer thinker that the Vogon had never been born).
*The protruding upper halves of the letters (that once read
"Share and Enjoy", the motto of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints
Division) now appear in the local language to read "Go stick your head in a
pig" and are only lit up on special occasions.
"I think the only reason I waste my breath on you is that
being dead, I don't have any other use for it."
*When a recent edition of Playbeing magazine headlined an
article, "When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta , you are tired of life," the
suicide rate there quadrupled overnight.
*"I am here, my body wanted to come but it's a bit busy at the
moment. Things to do, people to see. You know how it is with bodies..The truth
is that we are currently undergoing a period of legal trial separation. I
suspect it will end in divorce. 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. And now my body refuses
to let me in. It won't even see me. It says I only inhibit it. I pointed out
that in fact I was meant to inhabit it, and it said that that was exactly the
sort of smart alec remark that got right up a body's left nostril, and so we
left it. It will probably get custody of my forename."
Zaphod Beeblebrox slapped both his foreheads with two of his
arms and one of his thighs with the other.
*"Listen, little green person, my stomach could take you home
and cuddle you all night for the mere idea."
"Hey, wait a minute, you dead guys,"
*There is no problem involved in becoming your own mother or
father that a broad-minded and well adjusted family couldn't cope with.
He was built the one way builds a leather sofa; shiny, lumpy,
and with lots of solid stuffing.
"He's spending a year dead for tax reasons."
******"Would you like to meet the Dish of the Day?"."Good
evening, I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?
Something off the shoulder perhaps? Braised in a white wine sauce? Or the rump
is very good; I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a
lot of good meet there. May I urge you to consider my liver? It must be very
rich and tender by now; I've been force-feeding myself for months."."Four rare
steaks please and hurry; we haven't eaten in 576, 000, 000 years."."A wise
choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good, I'll just nip off and shoot myself.
Don't worry, sir, I will be very humane."******
*A party of smartly dressed young dogs stopped throwing rolls
at each other and started throwing rolls at the stage.
"Go bang your heads together, four-eyes."
"No, no, your monkey has it right, sir"
"I can even go and stick my head in a bucket of water if you
like.I've got one ready. Wait a minute.I hope that gave satisfaction."
"But what about the End of the Universe? We'll miss the big moment!" "I've seen
it. It's rubbish. Nothing but a gnab gib (opposite of a big bang)."
*"The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago
and that was with a coffee machine."
*There is an infinite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite
number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the
average population of all of the planets in the Universe can be said to be
zero. Therefore, any people you may meet from time to time are merely the
products of a deranged imagination.
"Property is theft, right? Therefore theft is property. Therefore this ship is
mine."
*"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working."
A song."I teleported home one night with Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggy's heart away and I got Sidney's leg."
*To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
"Pussy think, eat fish or not eat fish. I think it is better if I do not get involved."
"The secret of healthy hitchhiking is to eat junk food."
"And we interrogated a gazelle!"
*"One's never alone with a rubber duck."
"I'm trying to teach the cavemen to play scrabble."
One should never throw the letter Q into a privet bush, but unfortunately, there are times when it is unavoidable.
She went to sleep every night profoundly grateful for the fact that whatever she had to face in the morning it wouldn't be a hundred almost identical photographs of moodily lit tubes of toothpaste.