The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #2)

by Douglas Adams

the greatest experiment ever conducted—to

Question to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, he thought. There would be some celebration with his fellows tonight, and in the morning they would meet again their unhappy, bewildered and highly profitable patients, secure in the knowledge that the Meaning of Life would not now be, once and for all, well and truly sorted out, he thought.

“The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.

“you’re so weird you should be in movies.” “Yeah,” said Zaphod patting the thing on a glittering pink wing, “and you, baby, should be in real life.”

“If I ever meet myself,” said Zaphod, “I’ll hit myself so hard I won’t know what’s hit me.”

For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here.”

he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

Inside, all was gloom, dust and confusion.

(wioll haven be)

(willan on-take)

(mayan arrivan on-when)

(late fore-when)

(you can have on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome).

At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with (mayan meetan con with dinan on when) a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time.

“If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”

his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the spacetime continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.

How do you know you’re having fun if there’s no one watching you have it?

“Listen, you semievolved simian,” cut in Zaphod, “go climb a tree will you?” Arthur bristled. “Go bang your heads together four-eyes,” he advised Zaphod. “No, no,” the waiter said to Zaphod, “your monkey has got it right, sir.” Arthur stuttered in fury and said nothing apposite, or indeed coherent.

Give or take five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years or whatever, we never moved. Neat.”

“nothing but a gnab gib.”

“Five hundred and seventy-six thousand million, three thousand five hundred and seventy-nine years,”

AREA: Infinite. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of the word “Infinite.” Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real “wow, that’s big,” time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we’re trying to get across here.

It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

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?”

misbegotten

“So this is it,” said Arthur, “we’re going to die.” “I wish you’d stop saying that,” said Ford. It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in “It’s a nice day,” or “You’re very tall,” or “So this is it, we’re going to die.”

If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.”

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

“How can I tell,” said the man, “that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?”