The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1)

by Douglas Adams

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, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall,or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?

Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to life again.

‘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.’

‘Excuse me,’ he said to him, ‘what is your name by the way?’ ‘My name?’ said the old man, and the same distant sadness came into his face again. He paused. ‘My name,’ he said, ‘…is Slartibartfast.’ Arthur practically choked. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he spluttered. ‘Slartibartfast,’ repeated the old man quietly. ‘Slartibartfast?’ The old man looked at him gravely. ‘I said it wasn’t important,’ he said.

‘Why,’ said Ford squatting down beside him and shivering, ‘are you lying face down in the dust?’ ‘It’s a very effective way of being wretched,’ said Marvin.