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

by Douglas Adams

Anything that happens, happens.

Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.

It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

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

I have a feeling I'm going to be quoting tbis book often. Lol! :)

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

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.

“I know that astrology isn’t a science,” said Gail. “Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or — what’s that strange thing you British play?” “Er, cricket? Self-loathing?”

Arthur Dent had been in some hell holes in his life, but he had never before seen a spaceport that had a sign saying “Even traveling despondently is better than arriving here.”

Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.

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

“You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.”

“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.’

The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen is that it won’t. That is not what “accident” means.

Arthur Dent, because of the sheer boredom of endless interstellar flight was the only one on board who actually had familiarized himself with the ship’s safety procedures in case of an unscheduled landing, was the sole survivor. He lay dazed, broken and bleeding in a sort of fluffy pink plastic cocoon with “Have a nice day” printed in more than three thousand different languages all over it.

Lol!

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

Ha! Ha! Ha!

“Ah! One of the smartest features of the Breathe-O-Smart is that it cannot possibly go wrong. So. No worries on that score. Enjoy your breathing now, and have a nice day.”

“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.”)

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.

It wasn’t that he had not expected being a father to be this difficult, it was that he hadn’t expected to be a father at all, particularly not suddenly and unexpectedly on an alien planet.

Leaping onto the back of a one-and-a-half-ton Perfectly Normal Beast migrating through your world at a thundering thirty miles an hour is not as easy as it might at first seem.