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

by Douglas Adams

I took a number of baths – and a degree in English. I worried a lot about girls and what had happened to my bike.

At this point they said, very pleasantly and politely, that I had already passed ten deadlines, so would I please just finish the page I was on and let them have the damn thing.

commonly known as the Christmas episode. It contained no reference of any kind to Christmas. It

I love how he writes

Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee. Yawn.

The word yellow wandered through his mind in search of something to connect with. Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path.

derisive

Mr Prosser’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times whilst his mind was for a moment filled with inexplicable but terribly attractive visions of Arthur Dent’s house being consumed with fire and Arthur himself running screaming from the blazing ruin with at least three hefty spears protruding from his back. Mr Prosser was often bothered with visions like these and they made him feel very nervous.

Ford would get out of his skull on whisky, huddle into a corner with some girl and explain to her in slurred phrases that honestly the colour of the flying saucers didn’t matter that much really.

Me

diurnal

For a few seconds Ford seemed to ignore him, and stared fixedly into the sky like a rabbit trying to get run over by a car.

final loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually obscenely biological.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

Real

‘you should send that in to the Reader’s Digest. They’ve got a page for people like you.’

‘This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer, ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays.’

‘Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.’

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

There was a terrible ghastly silence. There was a terrible ghastly noise. There was a terrible ghastly silence.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippy, good-timer, (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.

‘Hey,’ he cooed to himself, ‘you’re a real cool boy, you.’

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.

anachronism.

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?

If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

‘this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of.’

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.

they don’t give a wet slap about anything else.

‘And what’s happened to the Earth?’ ‘Ah. It’s been demolished.’ ‘Has it,’ said Arthur levelly. ‘Yes. It just boiled away into space.’ ‘Look,’ said Arthur, ‘I’m a bit upset about that.’

Dry humor

‘Keep looking at the book!’ he hissed urgently. ‘What?’ ‘Don’t Panic.’ ‘I’m not panicking!’ ‘Yes you are.’ ‘All right, so I’m panicking, what else is there to do?’ ‘You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy’s a fun place. You’ll need to have this fish in your ear.’

‘Charming man,’ he said. ‘I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one…’

At that moment the bottom fell out of Arthur’s mind. His eyes turned inside out. His feet began to leak out of the top of his head.

McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.

you know, the uniform, the low-slung stun-ray holster, the mindless tedium…’

condescension,

Ford and Arthur popped into out space like corks from a toy gun.

my left arm’s come off too.’ A frightening thought struck him: ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘how am I going to operate my digital watch now?’

‘Ford,’ he said, ‘you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.’

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartass.

crazy shit

‘Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don’t know why I bother to say it, oh God I’m so depressed.

‘If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.’

Ford was not going to be outcooled.

‘Hey, have you any idea what these strange symbols are?’ ‘I think they’re just strange symbols of some kind,’ said Zaphod, hardly glancing back.

‘I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.’

Arthur slapped his arms about himself to try and get his circulation a little more enthusiastic about its job.

The wall defied the imagination – seduced it and defeated it.

‘Look,’ said Arthur, ‘would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?’

messianic.’

mean what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?’

He gestured Arthur towards a chair which looked as if it had been made out of the ribcage of a stegosaurus. ‘It was made out of the ribcage of a stegosaurus,’

‘We’re going to get lynched, aren’t we?’ he whispered.

‘That’s it,’ said Zaphod with the sort of grin that would get most people locked away in a room with soft walls.