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.

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.

The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer’s parrot

Gail Andrews was not exactly a household name, but the moment you mentioned President Hudson, Cool Whip and the amputation of Damascus (the world had moved on from surgical strikes — the official term had in fact been “Damascectomy,” meaning the “taking out” of Damascus), everyone remembered who you meant.

So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.

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. Sounds like you noticed one.”

Of course, up and down, north and south, are absolutely arbitrary designations, but we are used to seeing things the way we are used to seeing them, and Arthur had to turn the maps upside down to make sense of them.

If his accounts supervisor didn’t start to hyperventilate and put out a seal-all-exits security alert when Ford handed in his expenses claim, then Ford felt he wasn’t doing his job properly.

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.’

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

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

“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.

Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.

If you’d like to know, I can tell you that in your universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability.

“So what’s the point of showing me something I can’t see?” “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.”

Old Thrashbarg had said on one occasion that sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away.

“Life,” he said, “will be a very great deal less weird without you!” Arthur was stunned. “Do you know,” he said, “I think that’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to me?”

Part of solving any problem, she told herself, was realizing that you had it.

You know,” he said, sitting back, reflectively, “it’s at times like this that you kind of wonder if it’s worth worrying about the fabric of space-time and the causal integrity of the multidimensional probability matrix and the potential collapse of all waveforms in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and all that sort of stuff that’s been bugging me. Maybe I feel that what the big guy says is right. Just let it all go. What does it matter? Let it go.”

A tremendous feeling of peace came over him. He knew that at last, for once and forever, it was now all, finally, over.