The Reading Room

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

“The story so far: 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 fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”

“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”

“Don't Panic.”

“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 theory which states that this has already happened.”

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

“A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.”

“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.”

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”

“Life... is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangey-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.”

“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.”

“All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.”

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

“To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”

“I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?”

“God's Final Message to His Creation: 'We apologize for the inconvenience.”

“This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”

“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.”

“There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.”

“I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.”

“Ow! My brains!”

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.”

“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”

“Life is wasted on the living.”

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

“If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.”

“What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.”

“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

“Can't stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I'll tell them what to do. Don't get bitten in the first place. (quoting Dr. Struan Sutherland)”

“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.”

“I'd far rather be happy than right any day.”

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”

“Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.”

“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.”

“The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.”

“So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed. The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths. Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.”

“He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.”

“We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.”

“We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.”

“But unless we determine to take action,' said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, 'then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care about that?' 'Not enough to want to get killed over it,' said Ford.”