"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..." Words of Wisdom & Quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide "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." "For a few seconds, Ford seemed to ignore him, and stared fixedly up at the sky like a rabbit trying to get run over by a car." "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." "The terror moved slowly through the gathered crowds as if they were iron filings on a sheet of board and a magnet was moving beneath them." "Please relax,' the voice said pleasantly, like a stewardess in an airliner with only one wing and two engines, one of which is on fire, 'you are perfectly safe." "She gave Arthur a pleasant smile which settled on him like a ton of bricks and then turned her attention to the controls again." "He had an odd feeling of being like a man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman's husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks about the weather and leaves again." 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. The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. The history of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is now so complicated that every time I tell it I contradict myself, and whenever I do get it right I'm misquoted. So the publication of this omnibus edition seemed like a good opportunity to set the record straight--or at least firmly crooked. You barbarians! I'll sue the council for every penny it's got! I'l have you hung, drawn, and quartered! And whipped! And boiled...until...until...until you've had enough. And then I will do it again! And when I've finished I will take all the little bits, and I will JUMP on them! And I will carry on jumping on them until I get blisters, or I can think of anything even more unpleasant to do... Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of. Charming man. I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one... He was experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick. Or of looking at a lot of colored dots on a piece of paper which suddenly resolve themselves into the figure six and mean that your optician is going to charge you a lot of money for a new pair of glasses. "But," say 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 though of that" and promply vanishes in a puff of logic. Arthur: You know, it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young. Ford: Why, what did she tell you? Arthur: I don't know, I didn't listen. It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them. 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 as 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. Number Two's eyes narrowed and became what are known in the Shouting and Killing People trade as cold slits, the idea presumable 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. 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 to healthy hitchhiking is to eat junk food. 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. "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. " "Ah, " said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of. " "I don't know, " said the voice on the PA, "apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at all. " "Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence 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. "Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz smiled very slowly. This was done not so much for effect as because he was trying to remember the sequence of muscle movements. " "OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah? " "In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. " "Nuts to your white mice, " he said. "For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen. " (aikamuotojen käyttö aikamatkustuksessa) "You can arrive (mayan arivan on-when) for any sitting you like without prior (late fore-when) reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were when you return to your own time. (you can have on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome.) " "The suit into which the man's body had been stuffed looked as if it's only purpose in life was to demonstrate how difficult it was to get this sort of body into a suit." "He dropped his voice still lower. In the stillness, a fly would not have dared cleat its throat. " "And finally, " said Max, quieting the audience down and putting on his solemn face, "finally I believe we have with us here tonight, a party of believers, very devout believers, from the Church of the Second Coming of the Great Prophet Zarquon. " ... "There they are, " said Max, "sitting there, patiently. He said he'd come again, and he's kept you waiting a long time, so let's hope he's hurrying fellas, because he's only got eight minutes left! " "As he came into the light they could see his black and gold uniform on which the buttons were so highly polished that they shone with an intensity that would have made an approaching motorist flash his lights in annoyance. " "You're very sure of your facts, " he said at last, "I couldn't trust the thinking of a man who takes the Universe - if there is one - for granted. " "Rome wasn't burned in a day. " "Does it worry you that you don't talk any kind of sense? " "One's never alone with a rubber duck. " "Another world, another day, another dawn. " "He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was the sort of man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas with you. " "It was real. At least, if it wasn't real, it did support them, and as that is what sofas are supposed to do, this, by any test that mattered, was a real sofa." "You're one hundred percent positive that the ship which is crashed on the bottom of this ocean is the ship which you said you were one hundred percent positive could one hundred percent positively never crash? " "Yes, it's the right planet, all right, " he said again. "Right planet, wrong universe." "Ford had his own code of ethics. It wasn't much of one, but it was his and he stuck by it, more or less. One rule he made was never to buy his own drinks. He wasn't sure if that counted as an ethic, but you have to go with what you've got." "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." "Arthur slapped his arms about himself to try and get his circulation a little more enthusiastic about its job." "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."