I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they go by.
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 - whilst 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.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer."
Marvin: "I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."
Zem: "Er, five."
Marvin: "Wrong. You see?"
"I'd far rather be happy than right any day." Slartibartfast
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
"If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now."
"I don't want to die now. I've still got a headache. I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it"
"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 of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
[Ford Prefect:] "Why, what did she tell you?"
[Arthur:] "I don't know, I didn't listen."
[The World Wide Web is] the only thing I know of whose shortened form — www — takes three times longer to say than what it's short for.
"You guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off."
Arthur: "Marvin, any ideas?"
Marvin: "I have a million ideas. They all point to certain death."
"What's up?" [asked Ford.]
"I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there."
"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?"
I could calculate your chance of survival, but you won't like it.
"Listen, three eyes,", he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal."
"My capacity for happiness," he added, "you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first"
"Six pints of bitter," said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. "And quickly please, the world's about to end."
For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.
The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.
The Guide is definitive. Reality is often inaccurate. Notice on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's publisher waiting hall.
