The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
---Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy---
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"I thought," he said "that if the world is going to end we were meant to lie
down or put a paper bag over our head or something."
"If you like, yes," said Ford.
"That's what they told us in the army," said the man, and his eyes began
the long trek back toward his whisky.
"Will that help?" asked the barman.
"No," said Ford and gave him a friendly smile.
---Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy---
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For thousands more years, the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes
of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came
across - which happened to be Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation
of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
---Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy---
----------------------------------------------------
He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup
filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
---Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy---
--------------------------------------------------------
It wasn't infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting.
Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity - distance is
incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar
emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big
that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.
---Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy---
-------------------------------------------------------
A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy.
....
Two hundred and thirty-nine thousand lightly fried eggs fell out of it too,
materializing in a large wobbly heap on the famine-struck land of Poghril
in the Pansel system.
The whole Poghril tribe had died out from famine except for one last man who
died of cholesterol poisoning some weeks later.
---Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy---
-------------------------------------------------------------
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.
---Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy---
----------------------------------------------------
"Don't blame you," said [robot] Marvin and counted five hundred and
ninety-seven billion sheep before falling asleep again a second later.
---Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy---
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has, in what we laughingly call the past,
had a great deal to say on the subject of parallel universes. Very little of
this is, however, at all comprehensible to anyone below the level of Advanced
God, and since it is now well established that all known gods came into
existence a good three millionths of a second after the Universe began rather
than, as they usually claimed, the previous week, they already have a great
deal of explaining to do as it is, and are therefore not available to comment
on matters of deep physics at this time.
---Douglas Adams: Mostly Harmless---
--------------------------------------------------
"You know," said Arthur, "it is 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."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen."
---Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy---
-------------------------------------------------------------
The fronting for the eighty-yard-long marble-topped bar had been made by
stitching together nearly twenty thousand Antarean Mosaic Lizzard skins,
despite the fact that the twenty thousand lizzards concerned needed them
to keep their insides in.
----Douglas Adams: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe---
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"The corridor they were concealed in was not like the others. It was very
short, and ended at a large steel door. Ford examined it, discovered the
opening mechanism and pushed it wide.
The first thing that hit their eyes was what appeared to be a coffin.
And the next four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine things that
hit their eyes were also coffins."
---Douglas Adams: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe---
---------------------------------------------
The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people
angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the
Jatravatrid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in
fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.
The Jatravatrids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call the
Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more
than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in
history that invented aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
----Douglas Adams: 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.
----Douglas Adams: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe---
--------------------------------------------------
"The Guide says that there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather
a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground
and miss."
---Douglas Adams: Life, the Universe and Everything---
-------------------------------------------------
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
---Douglas Adams: Life, the Universe and Everything---
--------------------------------------------------
For a moment or two the old man didn't reply. He was staring at the
instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit
to centigrade in his head while his house is burning down.
---Douglas Adams: Life, the Universe and Everything---
----------------------------------------------------
Important fact from Galactic History, Number One: (reproduced from
the Siderial Daily Mentioner's Book of Popular Galactic History)
The night sky over the planet Krikkit is the least interesting sight
in the entire Universe.
---Douglas Adams: Life, the Universe and Everything---
--------------------------------------------------
He had just had a wonderful idea about how to cope with the terrible
lonely isolation, the nightmares, the failure of all his attempts at
horticulture, and the sheer futurelessness and futility of his life
here on prehistoric Earth, which was that he would go mad.
---Douglas Adams: Life, the Universe and Everything---
--------------------------------------------------
He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was that sort of
man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas with you.
He unhooked the shaft of his hammer from his belt. He held it up in his
hands to reveal the massive iron head. He thus cleared up a possible
misunderstanding that he might merely have been carrying a telegraph
pole around with him.
---Douglas Adams: Life, the Universe and Everything---
---------------------------------------------------
Will Smithers, for instance, the owner of Know-Nothing-Bozo the Non-Wonder
Dog, an animal so stupid that it has been sacked from one of Will's own
commercials for being incapable of knowing which dog food it was supposed
to prefer, despite the fact that the meat in all the other bowls had engine
oil poured all over it.
---Douglas Adams: So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish---
-----------------------------------------------
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.
---Douglas Adams: So long, and thanks for all the fish---
-----------------------------------------------
Her physical presence there in the car, his car, was quite extraordinary
to Arthur. He felt, as he let the car pull slowly away, that he could hardly
think or breathe, and hoped that neither of these functions was vital to his
driving or they were in trouble.
---Douglas Adams: So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish---
---------------------------------------------------
He watched the long slow Pacific waves come in along the sand, and waited
and waited for the nothing that he knew would happen. As the time came for
it not to happen, it duly didn't happen and so the afternoon wore itself
away and the sun dropped beneath the long line of the sea, and the day was
gone.
---Douglas Adams: So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish---
---------------------------------------------------
He gazed out at the Pacific as well. There were little sandpipers running
along the margin of the shore which seemed to have this problem: they
needed to find their food in the sand which a wave had just washed over,
but they couldn't bear to get their feet wet. To deal with this problem
they ran with an odd kind of movement as if they'd been constructed by
somebody very clever in Switzerland.
---Douglas Adams: So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish---
---------------------------------------------------
Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened.
A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously
detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the
ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had
been hit by a meteorite.
---Douglas Adams: Mostly Harmless---
---------------------------------------------------
Arthur checked himself into a small motel on the outskirts of town and sat
glumly on the bed, which was damp, and flipped through the little information
brochure, which was also damp. It said that the planet of NowWhat had been
named after the opening words of the first settlers to arrive there after
struggling across light years of space to reach the farthest unexplored
outreaches of the Galaxy.
...
The main trade that was carried out was in the skins of the NowWhattian
boghog but it wasn't a very succesful one because no one in their right
minds would want to buy a NowWhattian boghog skin. The trade only hung on
by its fingernails because there was always a significant number of people
in the Galaxy who were not in their right minds.
---Douglas Adams: Mostly Harmless---
---------------------------------------------------
The ship's systems protested all the way down that everything was perfectly
normal and under control, but when it went into a final hectic spin, ripped
wildly through half a mile of trees and finally exploded into a seething
ball of flame, it became clear that this was not the case.
---Douglas Adams: Mostly Harmless---
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It was a little like a pikka bird, only rather smaller. That is to say, in
fact it was larger, or to be more exact, precisely the same size or, at least,
not less than twice the size. It was also both a lot bluer and a lot pinker
than pikka birds, while at the same time being perfectly black.
---Douglas Adams: Mostly Harmless---
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A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely
foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
---Douglas Adams: Mostly Harmless---
----------------------------------------------------
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot
more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position
of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.
---Douglas Adams: Mostly Harmless---
------------------------------------------------------------------
He looked up at the sky, which was sullen, streaked and livid, and reflected
that it was the sort of sky that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wouldn't
feel like a bunch of complete idiots riding out of.
---Douglas Adams: Mostly Harmless---
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Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat [of the company] 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.
---Douglas Adams: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
------------------------------------------------------------------
"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."
---Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency---
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"The girl giggled and glanced up at Watkin, who stiffened and made an
appallingly unsuccessful attempt to smile good-naturedly."
---Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency---
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