Mostly Harmless (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #5)

by Douglas Adams

She had even imagined that a bird in Central Park had been peering at her rather intently.

What King Antwelm had assumed was that what everybody wanted, all other things being equal, was to be happy and enjoy themselves and have the best possible time together.

The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop.

such as “relief,” “joy,” “friskiness,” “appetite,” “satisfaction,” and most important of all, the desire for “happiness.” This was the biggest breakthrough of all.

Ford even began to whistle, which was probably his mistake. Nobody likes a whistler,

He had to get a grip on the situation, be able to look at the physical world he was in while drawing himself out of it emotionally.

We all like to congregate,” he went on, “at boundary conditions.”

“You come to me for advice, but you can’t cope with anything you don’t recognize. Hmmm. So we’ll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual, I suppose.”

“Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.”

‘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.’ That’s it. It’s what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.”

‘Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen.’

“I hate to be anthropic about this,”

Ford Prefect dropping past them to his certain death and flipping the finger at them.

“Colin!” Ford bawled. Colin didn’t respond. Ford went cold. Then he suddenly realized that he hadn’t told Colin his name was Colin.

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”)

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.

“So that you understand that just because you see something, it doesn’t mean to say it’s there. And if you don’t see something, it doesn’t mean to say it’s not there. It’s only what your senses bring to your attention.”

“Your universe is vast to you. Vast in time, vast in space. That’s because of the filters through which you perceive it. But I was built with no filters at all, which means I perceive the Mish Mash which contains all possible universes but which has, itself, no size at all. For me, anything is possible. I am omniscient and omnipotent, extremely vain and, what is more, I come in a handy self-carrying package. You have to work out how much of the above is true.”

It would be hard to say which he was more frightened of: that he might have hurt the person he had inadvertently sat on or that the person he had inadvertently sat on would hurt him back.

I said please, for Zark’s sake, don’t take my ship. And don’t leave me stranded in the middle of some primitive zarking forest with no medical help and a head injury. I could be in serious trouble and so could she.” “What did she say?” “She hit me on the head with the rock again.” “I think I can confirm that that was my daughter.” “Sweet kid.” “You have to get to know her,” said Arthur. “She eases up, does she?” “No,” said Arthur, “but you get a better sense of when to duck.”

What happens when the brackets collapse? Where’s the final ’end if?

that sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away.

Dim lights danced briefly in the black eyes of the bird as, deep in its instructional address space, bracket after bracket was finally closing, if clauses were finally ending, repeat loops halting, recursive functions calling themselves for the last few times.