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

by Douglas Adams

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

“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.

She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from the supermarket. You get one of those carts, which simply will not go in the direction you push it, and end up just having to buy completely different stuff.

“Don’t tell me about the future,” said Ford. “I’ve been all over the future. Spend half my time there. It’s the same as anywhere else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air.”

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

“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.”

There were several of them, in fact, and all of them seemed to be more heavily armed and armored than you normally expected corporate executives to be, even in today’s rough-and-tumble business world.

Yes, given the infinite sideways extension of probability, there was, of course, an almost infinite multiplicity of planets Earth, but, when you come down to it, a major pair of shoes wasn’t something you could just replace by mucking about in multidimensional space-time.

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

You live and learn. At any rate, you live. You also panic.