Quotes from Douglas Adams Novels: "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle." - Arthur Dent "I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed." - Marvin "... one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself." - Douglas Adams "The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." - Hitchhiker's "We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" - Vroomfondel "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." - Ford Prefect "Funny how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does." - Marvin "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 "Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is seen as evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality." - Douglas Adams "Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word "safe" that I wasn't previously aware of." - Arthur Dent "You'll have to excuse me, I'm terribly happy." - Arthur Dent "Man then went on to prove that black was white and got killed in the next zebra crossing." - Douglas Adams ------cut here------ And here's the second collection: ------cut here------ "I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy = "It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'" - HHGG = "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!" - HHGG = "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." "Why, what did she tell you?" "I don't know, I didn't listen." - HHGG = "So this is it, we are going to die." "Yes, except...no! Wait a minute! What's this switch?" "What? Where?" "No, I was only fooling, we are going to die after all." - HHGG = "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen..." - HHGG = "Who was that?" "Who--the man with the five heads and the elderberry bush full of kippers?" "Yes." "I don't know. Just someone." "Ah." - HHGG = "Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." - HHGG = "Ford! There's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for 'Hamlet' they've worked out." - HHGG = "It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart-ass." - HHGG = "Well, here's something to occupy you and keep your mind off things." "It won't work, I have an exceptionally large mind." - HHGG = "No, no, Marvin, that's just fine, really...just part of life." "Life, don't talk to me about life." - HHGG = "Am I *busy*? Well, I've just got all these bulldozers and things to lie in front of because they'll knock my house down if I don't, but other than that ...well, no, not especially, why?" - HHGG = "He reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words 'Please do not press this button again.'" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy = "Can we drop your ego for a moment? This is important." "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now." - HHGG = "Thank you for making a simple door very happy." "Funny, how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does." - HHGG = "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." - HHGG = "However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy = "The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose complaints department now covers all the major landmasses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system." - HHGG = "It is most gratifying that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients, and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a courtesy detail." - HHGG = "Hey, this is terrific! Someone down there is trying to kill us!" - HHGG = "Then what's happened to the missiles?" "They would appear to have turned into a bowl of petunias and a very surprised-looking whale..." - HHGG = "Myself I'd trust him to the end of the Earth." "Oh yes, and how far's that?" "About twelve minutes away, come on, I need a drink." - HHGG = "It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick." - HHGG = "What do you mean, you've never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light-years away, you know." - HHGG = "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." - HHGG = "The other kids at school nicknamed him Ix, which in the language of Betelgeuse Five translates as 'boy who is not able satisfactorily to explain what a Hrung is, nor why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven.'" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy = "The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal." - HHGG = "You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy's a fun place. You'll need to have this fish in your ear." "I beg your pardon?" - HHGG = "Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it." - HHGG = "Look, would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy = "Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?" - HHGG = "You'll have a national Philosophers' strike on your hands!" - HHGG = "The Answer to the Great Question..." "Yes...!" "Of Life, the Universe and Everything..." "Yes...!" "Is..." "Yes...!" "Is..." "Yes...!!!...?" "Forty-two." - HHGG = "I wouldn't trust myself further than I could spit a rat." - HHGG = "Now--either you all give yourselves up now and let us beat you up a bit, though not very much of course because we are firmly opposed to needless violence, or we blow up this entire planet and possibly one or two others we noticed on our way out here!" - HHGG = "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - RAEU = "That drink was individually tailored to meet your personal requirements for nutrition and pleasure." "Ah, so I'm a masochist on a diet am I?" - RAEU = "The _Guide_ is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate." - RAEU = "Listen, three eyes, don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal." - RAEU = "*The* Zaphod Beeblebrox?" "No, just *a* Zaphod Beeblebrox; didn't you hear I come in six packs?" - RAEU = "Hey, where did you say this building was flying to?" - RAEU = "...and the Universe will explode later for your pleasure." - RAEU = "You're looking great, really very, very fat and unwell." - RAEU = "Would you like to see the menu? Or would you like to meet the Dish of the Day?" - RAEU = "May I interest you in parts of my body?" - RAEU = "After this, there is nothing. Void. Emptiness. Oblivion. Absolutely nothing... Nothing...except, of course, for the desserts and a fine selection of Aldebaran liqueurs!" - RAEU = "And now, at the risk of putting a damper on the wonderful sense of doom and futility here this evening, I would like to welcome a few parties" - RAEU = "Go bang your heads together, four-eyes." - RAEU = "The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline." - RAEU = "Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls that are labeled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it." - RAEU = "A dead telephone sanitizer?" "Best kind." "But what's he doing here?" "Not a lot." - RAEU = "All right, you scum, you vermin... What do you want to drink?!!" - RAEU = "Trouble with a long journey like this is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you're going to say next." - RAEU = "I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?" - RAEU = "How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?" - RAEU = "The Lord knows I am not a cruel man." "Ah! You say 'The Lord.' You believe in something!" "My cat, I call him The Lord. I am Kind to him." - RAEU = "The secret of healthy hitchhiking is to eat junk food." - RAEU = "I read of one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole. Killed ten billion people." "That's mad." "Yes, only scored thirty points too." - RAEU = "I will go mad!" "Good idea. I went mad for a while, did me no end of good." - LUAE = "The point is, you see, that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later." - Life, the Universe and Everything = "Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants." - Life, the Universe and Everything = "The people of Krikkit are, well, you know, they're just a bunch of real sweet guys, you know, who just happen to want to kill everybody." - LUAE = "They believe in 'peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.'" - LUAE = "Hey, is there something in this water?" "Er, no, m'lud." "Then take it away, and put something in it." - Life, the Universe and Everything = "Seems a strange way to relate to somebody you've got nothing against, killing them all the time." - Life, the Universe and Everything = "Yes, why stop now just when I'm hating it?" - LUAE = "That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms is has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting." - Life, the Universe and Everything = "It's a very, very small bomb." "Yeah?" "That would destroy the Universe completely. Good idea, if you ask me." - Life, the Universe and Everything = "Hello everone, sorry I'm a bit late had a terrible time all sorts of things cropping up at the last moment. How we for time? Er" -- RAEU = "I'm here. My body wanted to come, but it's a bit busy at the moment. Things to do people to see. You know how it is with bodies." -- LUAE = "Ode to a small lump of green putty I found in my armpit one midsummer morning . . . - A poem by Grunthos" -- HHGG = "Vell, He's just zis guy you know?" -- RAEU = "Sorry but I'm busy spending a year dead for tax reasons." -- RAEU = "Life is like a grapefruit." - So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish = "His five-year mission to seek out and explore strange new worlds, and sell Advanced Music Substitute Systems to their restaurants, elevators, and wine bars!" - So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish = "Hello, yes, Megadodo publications... sorry, no, he's unavailable at the moment. He's on an intergalactic cruise in his office. " -- LUAE