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January 4 - January 8, 2022
They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they want to be.
‘None at all,’ said Mr Prosser, and stormed nervously off wondering why his brain was filled with a thousand hairy horsemen all shouting at him.
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.
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,
human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up.
If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.
‘I like the cover,’ he said. ‘Don’t Panic. It’s the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody’s said to me all day.’
‘The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
‘You know,’ said Arthur, ‘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.’
Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason why he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.
One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.
Parts of the inside of her head screamed at other parts of the inside of her head.
He 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.
‘Life,’ said Marvin dolefully, ‘loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.’
‘Because . . . because . . . I think it might be because if I knew I wouldn’t be able to look for them.’ ‘What, are you, crazy?’ ‘It’s a possibility I haven’t ruled out yet,’ said Zaphod quietly. ‘I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.’
And then whenever I stop and think – why did I want to do something? – how did I work out how to do it? – I get a very strong desire just to stop thinking about it. Like I have now. It’s a big effort to talk about it.’
‘That’s right,’ shouted Vroomfondel, ‘we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!’
I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multi-dimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.
‘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?’
