Mostly Harmless (Hitchhiker's Guide, #5)

by Douglas Adams

Anything that happens, happens.

Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.

Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen aga...

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

life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.

but it’s quite another to be the sort of animal that has to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your planet’s orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin’s bubbling.

When it’s fall in New York, the air smells as if someone’s been frying goats in it, and if you are keen to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head in a building.

Tricia had just been to see Woody Allen’s new movie, which was all about the angst of being neurotic in New York. He had made one or two other movies that had explored the same theme,

British accents were telling jokes on David Letterman and Jay Leno. Nobody understood the jokes but they were really responding to the accents,

It was a 212 area code number. So it was someone in New York. Who was not happy. Well, that narrowed it down a bit, didn’t it?

Surely the notion that great lumps of rock whirling in space knew something about your day that you didn’t must take a bit of a knock from the fact that there was suddenly a new lump of rock out there that nobody had known about before.

Never go back for your bag.

People in New York were not nice to each other without reason.

know that astrology isn’t a science,’ said Gail. ‘Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what’s that strange thing you British play?’ ‘Er, cricket? Self-loathing?’ ‘Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves.

it is now well established that all known gods came into existence a good three millionths of a second after the Universe began rather than, as they usually claimed, the previous week,

In the afternoon she got up and prowled around restlessly, not certain what to do with the rest of the day, or indeed the rest of her life.

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does.

He had to find out who the hell this person was, and he suddenly thought of a way of doing it. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded.

Laser light flickered all over him as if he was a packet of biscuits at a supermarket check-out.

It was a programming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to high political office.

‘Here, hold this. Not that, this. No, not like that. This way up. Other way round, you fool.’

It’ll all end in tears. Probably already has.’

the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.

‘A beach house isn’t just real estate. It’s a state of mind,’

‘Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other.’

“Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.”

“Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen.”

all of them seemed to be more heavily armed and armoured than you normally expected corporate executives to be, even in today’s rough and tumble business world.

What the hell, he thought, you’re only young once, and threw himself out of the window. That would at least keep the element of surprise on his side.

He started to travel with wild abandon, trading in more and more spit, toenails, fingernails, blood, hair, anything that anybody wanted, for tickets. For semen, he discovered, he could travel first class.

Fire engulfed the forest, boiled into the night, then neatly put itself out, as all unscheduled fires over a certain size are now required to do by law.

It hadn’t had a thirteenth floor. He’d thought no more about it because, having spent fifteen years on the rather backward planet Earth where they were superstitious about the number thirteen, he was used to being in buildings that numbered their floors without it.

Other hitchhikers had seen fit to modify their towels in exotic ways, weaving all kinds of esoteric tools and utilities and even computer equipment into their fabric.

Thin air, as all experienced Galactic travellers well know, is, in fact, extremely thick with multi-dimensional complexities.

It was as dark and silent as the tomb. No. That was a ridiculous thing to think. He’d been to some great parties in tombs.

The thing they wouldn’t be expecting him to do was to be there in the first place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, so he was winning already.

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

‘My life’s work,’ said Arthur, trying to sound proud and hoping he didn’t sound like a complete idiot.

‘Random?’ she called. ‘Come in. Come and meet your father.’

So everything was going well was it? Everything was working out as if the most extraordinary luck was on his side? Well, he’d see about that. In a spirit of scientific enquiry he hurled himself out of the window again.

‘I don’t love you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t even know you yet. But give me a few minutes.’

Arthur had almost given up. That is to say, he was not going to give up. He was absolutely not going to give up. Not now. Not ever. But if he had been the sort of person who was going to give up, this was probably the time he would have done it.

He was going to love her if it killed him, or her, or both.

Her mood swings were very unpredictable but so far they’d all been between different types of bad ones. Outbreaks of bitter recrimination would give way without warning to abject self-pity and then long bouts of sullen despair which were punctuated with sudden acts of mindless violence against inanimate objects and demands to go to electric clubs.

She brought up the display on her wrist panel, which automatically produced a readout of local time. Her wrist panel had quietly got on with the business of measuring the local gravity and orbital momentum, and had noticed where the sun was and tracked its movement in the sky, all within the first few minutes of Random’s arrival. It had then quickly picked up clues from its environment as to what the local unit conventions were and reset itself appropriately. It did this sort of thing continually, which was particularly valuable if you did a lot of travelling in time as well as space.

It wasn’t that she wanted to be difficult, as such, it was just that she didn’t know how or what else to be.

Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.

the parcel arrived, delivered by a kind of robot drone that dropped out of the sky making droning robot noises,

the combined orchestra and chorus of the Hallapolis State Opera performed the closing March of the AnjaQantine Star Guard from Act IV of Rizgar’s Blamwellamum of Woont

No, the answer is an orange and two lemons.’ ‘Lemons?’ ‘If I have three lemons and three oranges and I lose two oranges and a lemon what do I have left?’ ‘Huh?’ ‘OK, so you think that time flows that way, do you?