Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1)

by Douglas Adams

And time began seriously to pass.

It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

Susan waited. The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn’t ring.

“Hello, Michael? Yes, it’s Susan. Susan Way. You said I should call you if I was free this evening and I said I’d rather be dead in a ditch, remember? Well, I suddenly discover that I am free, absolutely, completely and utterly free, and there isn’t a decent ditch for miles around.

His own age was on the older side of completely indeterminate. If you picked a number at random, he was probably a little older than that, but—well, it was impossible to tell.

“Well,” said Reg, in a loudly confidential whisper, as if introducing the subject of nipple-piercing in a nunnery, “I hear you’ve suddenly done very well for yourself, at last, hmmm?”

Well, that was another thing that hadn’t changed. Some people pick their noses, others habitually beat up old ladies on the streets. Reg’s vice was a harmless if peculiar one—an addiction to childish conjuring tricks.

His heavy rimless glasses were almost solid cubes of glass within which his eyes appeared to lead independent existences like goldfish.

“We called ourselves The Reasonably Good Band, but in fact we weren’t. Our intention was to be the Beatles of the early eighties, but we got much better financial and legal advice than the Beatles ever did, which was basically ‘Don’t bother,’ so we didn’t.

Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.

Gordon Way’s astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing to his astonishment at what happened next.

Reg was having difficulty in finding the key from a collection which looked like something that a fit Ninja warrior could hurl through the trunk of a tree.

Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn’t the slightest idea what he was meant to do about it. It wasn’t a situation he had encountered before.

He had extracted himself from the Cambridge one-way system by the usual method, which involved going round and round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort of escape velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction, which he was now trying to identify and correct for.

There had been a nasty moment when his life had flashed before his eyes but he had been too preoccupied with falling and had missed all the good bits.

He waited again to see what he would do next and suddenly found to his surprise that he was already doing it,

“Founded in the year something or other, by someone I forget in honor of someone whose name for the moment escapes me.”

“it is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto nonexistent blindingly obvious. The cry ‘I could have thought of that’ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

There are certain events in the past, I’m afraid, from which I would wish to disassociate myself.” “Absolutely, I know how you feel. Most of the fourteenth century, for instance, was pretty grim,”

DEEP IN THE rain forest it was doing what it usually does in rain forests, which was raining: hence the name.