Mostly Harmless (Hitchhiker's Guide, #5)

by Douglas Adams

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living.

She was a rapidly rising anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care. Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else in life becomes eerily easy.

‘What I lost, I think, was a whole other life.’ ‘Everybody does that. Every moment of every day. Every single decision we make, every breath we draw, opens some doors and closes many others. Most of them we don’t notice. Some we do. Sounds like you noticed one.’

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

Old Thrashbarg had said on one occasion that sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away. Some of the villagers had privately said that this was the only properly wise thing they’d ever heard Thrashbarg say, and after a short debate on the matter, had put it down to chance.

It wasn’t his job to worry about that, though. It was his job to do his job, which was to do his job. If that led to a certain narrowness of vision and circularity of thought then it wasn’t his job to worry about such things. Any such things that came his way were referred to others who had, in turn, other people to refer such things to.