The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“All right,” said Ford, “I’ll try to explain. How long have we known each other?” “How long?” Arthur thought. “Er, about five years, maybe six,” he said. “Most of it seemed to make some sense at the time.”

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And no sneaky knocking down Mr. Dent's house whilst he's away, alright?

Ford Prefect

“Are you telling me,” he said, “that you set yourself up to become President of the Galaxy just to steal that ship?” “That’s it,” said Zaphod with the sort of grin that would get most people locked away in a room with soft walls.

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Arthur glanced around him once more, and then down at himself, at the sweaty disheveled clothes he had been lying in the mud in on Thursday morning. “I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,” he muttered to himself.

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Arthur stared into his beer. "Did I do anything wrong today," he said, "or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?"

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As soon as Mr. Prosser realized that he was substantially the loser after all, it was as if a weight lifted itself off his shoulders: this was more like the world as he knew it.

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Earthmen are not proud of their ancestors, and never invite them round to dinner.

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Er, excuse me, who am I? Hello? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I?

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"Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out!"

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“Ford,” he said. “you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.”

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If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

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"I refuse to prove that I exist", says God "for proves denies faith and without faith I am nothing".

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Is that robot yours? he said. “No,” came a thin metallic voice from the crater, “I’m mine.” “If you’d call it a robot,” muttered Arthur. “It’s more a sort of electronic sulking machine.”

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"It's at times like this, when I'm stuck in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelegeuse about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was little"

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Life, said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."

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Look, said Arthur, "would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"

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“My God,” complained Arthur, “you’re talking about a positive mental attitude and you haven’t even had your planet demolished today.”

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“Myself I’d trust him to the end of the Earth,” said Ford. “Oh yes,” said Arthur, “and how far’s that?” “About twelve minutes away,” said Ford, “come on, I need a drink.”

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Oh God, muttered Ford, slumped against a bulkhead and started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.

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Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.

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Talking to yourself is a sign of impending mental collapse.

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The suns blazed into the pitch of space and a low ghostly music floated through the bridge: Marvin was humming ironically because he hated humans so much.

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"Who said anything about panicking?" snapped Arthur. "This is still just the culture shock. You wait till I've settled down into the situation and found my bearings. Then I'll start panicking."

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“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.” “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” “You ask a glass of water.”

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Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippy, good timer, (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.

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“Zaphod! Wake up!” “Mmmmmwwwwwerrrrr?” “Hey come on, wake up.” “Just let me stick to what I’m good at, yeah?” muttered Zaphod and rolled away from the voice back to sleep.

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"Now the world has gone to bed,"

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One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidently becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with.

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After nearly four years of total isolation he was so pleased and relieved to see Ford that he could almost cry. Ford was, on the other hand, an almost immediately annoying person.

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A glummer look replaced the already glum look on Arthur Dent’s face. “So we’re not home and dry,” he said. “We could not even be said,” replied Ford, “to be home and vigorously toweling ourselves off.”

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A magician wandered along the beach, but no one needed him.

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Arthur had adopted his normal crisis role, which was to stand with his mouth hanging open and let it all wash over him.

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Arthur lay in startled stillness on the acceleration couch. He wasn't certain whether he had just got space-sickness or religion.

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Arthur, said Ford. "Hello? Yes?" said Arthur. "Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple." "Ah, well I'm not sure I believe that."

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Arthur's consciousness approached his body as from a great distance, and reluctantly. It had had some bad times in there. Slowly, nervously, it entered and settled down in to its accustomed position.

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A tall figure appeared silhouetted in the hatchway. It walked down the ramp and stood in front of Arthur. “You’re a jerk, Dent,” it said simply.

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Ford and Arthur decided just to relax and be harrowed.

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Ford looked angrily at him. “Will you listen?” he snapped. “I have been listening,” said Arthur, “but I’m not sure it’s helped.”

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Ford was practicing being sullen and getting quite good at it.

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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.

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"I'd love to stay and help you save the Galaxy," insisted Zaphod, rising himself up on to his shoulders, "but I have the mother and father of a pair of headaches, and I feel a lot of little headaches coming on."

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It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

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"I would like you to shut up about your towel," said Ford. "It isn't my towel," insisted Arthur, "that is the point I am trying to ..." "And the time at which I would like you to shut up about it," continued Ford in a low growl, "is now."

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My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre, he muttered to himself, "and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes."

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Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.

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“One thing,” he further added, “has suddenly ceased to lead to another” – in contradiction of which he had another drink and slid gracelessly off his chair.

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She didn’t even programme any coordinates, she hadn’t the faintest idea where she was going, she just went – a random row of dots flowing through the Universe. “Anything,” she said to herself as she left, “is better than this.”

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“That young girl,” he added unexpectedly, “is one of the least benightedly unintelligent life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.”

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The air was clear and scented, the breeze flitted lightly through the tall grass around his cave, the birds were chirruping at each other, the butterflies were flitting about prettily, and the whole of nature seemed to be conspiring to be as pleasant as it possibly could.

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“The point is, you see,” said Ford, “that there is no point driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself from going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.”

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The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.

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They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

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“Trillian?” he said. “She’s just a kid. Cute, yeah, but temperamental. You know how it is with women. Or perhaps you don’t. I assume you don’t. If you do I don’t want to hear about it. Plug us in.”

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“We would love to stay and help,” shouted Ford, picking his way over the mangled debris, “only we’re not going to.”

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“What was that?” hissed Arthur. “Something red,” hissed Ford back at him. “Where are we?” “Er, somewhere green.” “Shapes,” muttered Arthur. “I need shapes.”

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All eyes were on Ford. Some were on stalks.

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A man can’t cross a hundred thousand light years, mostly in other people’s baggage compartments, without beginning to fray a little, and Arthur had frayed a lot.

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And somewhere on this good boffo stretch of coastline lay the house of this inconsolable man, a man whom many regarded as being insane. But this was only, as he would tell people, because he was.

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But you don't understand, said Ford, his expression slowly ripening from a little taken abackness into rank incredulity. "This is the American Express Card. It is the finest way of settling bills known to man. Haven't you read their junk mail?"

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Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.

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He didn’t like to think of himself as the sort of person who giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now.

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He had read somewhere that the Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy s

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How reliable is he?" asked Fenchurch in a sinking voice. "How reliable?" said Arthur. He gave a hollow laugh. "How shallow is the ocean?" he said. "How cold is the sun?"

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It’s all right. There’s nothing to see, it’s all over. None of this is actually happening.

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“I was being perfectly serious,” said Arthur. “It’s just the Universe I’m never quite sure about.”

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Life is like a grapefruit. It's sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.

Douglas Adams

“Listen, bud,” said Ford, “if I had one Altairan dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say ‘That’s terrible’ I wouldn’t be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.”

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Suddenly he realized what the answer to the problem was, and it was this, that something very weird was happening; and if something very weird was happening, he thought, he wanted it to be happening to him.

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The Census report, like most such surveys, had cost an awful lot of money and didn’t tell anybody anything they didn’t already know – except that every single person in the Galaxy had 2.4 legs and owned a hyena.

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There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.

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"You'll have to excuse me," said Arthur. "I'm terribly happy."

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“Zaphod’s calmed down a lot you know.” “Really?” said Arthur, clustering hurriedly round Fenchurch to relieve her of the shopping. “Yeah,” said Ford, “at least one of his heads is now saner than an emu on acid.”

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You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot.

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Yeah, well, maybe I don't feel so keen on doing it all of a sudden. What do you think I am, completely without any moral whatsits, what are they called, those moral things?

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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?

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Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game.

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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.

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Besides, she told herself, taking a deep breath, if life had taught her anything it was this: Never go back for your bag.

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"Don't tell me about the future," said Ford. "I've been all over the future. Spend half my time there. It's the same as anywhere else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air."

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Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.

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He always entered via the ventilation system rather than the main lobby because the main lobby was patrolled by robots whose job it was to quiz incoming employees about their expense accounts.

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He had a very simple method of dealing with establishments of which he was not a member. He simply swept in as soon as the door was opened, pointed back at Arthur and said, “It’s OK, he’s with me.”

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He hadn’t had a day as bad as this since the Earth had been blown up.

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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.

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It wasn’t his job to worry about that, though. It was his job to do his job, which was to do his job. If that led to a certain narrowness of vision and circularity of thought then it wasn’t his job to worry about such things.

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It wasn’t merely that their left hand didn’t always know what their right hand was doing, so to speak; quite often their right hand had a pretty hazy notion as well.

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Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks. Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does.

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One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can’t. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

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People knew how to have a good time, and if they didn’t there were courses they could sign up for which would put that right.

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She was a rapidly rising anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.

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The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.

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The main town was called OhWell. There weren’t any other towns to speak of. Settlement on NowWhat had not been a success and the sort of people who actually wanted to live on NowWhat were not the sort of people you would want to spend time with.

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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.

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“You have to get to know her.” said Arthur. “She eases up does she?” “No,” said Arthur, “but you get a better sense of when to duck.”

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