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The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Ford Prefect

• "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p24
• "Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half of one for breakfast."
• "Oh, don't give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/No, don't you give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die/Won't you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit" - Orion Mining Song
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p15
• "It's unpleasantly like being drunk."
  Arthur: "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
  Ford: "You ask a glass of water."
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p59

Marvin

Zaphod Beeblebrox

• "I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer."
• "Why do we need to think? Can't we just sit here and go BUDUMBUDUMBBUDUMBUDUMBUDUMB with our lips for a bit?"
• "I'm so cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month! I'm so hip I have trouble seeing over my pelvis!"
• "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now."
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p97
• "You guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off."
• "So, ten out of ten for style but minus several million for good thinking ok?"
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p88
• "Listen, three eyes, don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal."
• "Hand me the raprod, Plate Captain."

The Book / Narration

• "Mostly Harmless"
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p63
• "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p1
  • This is the first line of the novel.
• "Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner."
• "In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri."
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p114
• "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
• "There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable... There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
• "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
  A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value— you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you—daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
  More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."
• "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
• "He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."
• "There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath."
• "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p34
• "...and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul."
• "The thing he realized about the windows was this: because they had been converted into openable windows after they had first been designed to be impregnable, they were, in fact, much less secure than if they had been designed as openable windows in the first place."
• "The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79."
• "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
• "He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p19
• "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."
  • Mostly Harmless
• "It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."
  • Life, the Universe and Everything, chapter 24
• "On the planet earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p156
• "Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived."
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p156
• "It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the product of a deranged imagination."
• The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizable number of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this. The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem. This is: Change. Read it through again and you'll get it.

Other

• "DON'T PANIC." - Words inscribed in large, friendly letters on front cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide.
• "We demand guaranteed rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty." - Vroomfondel.
• "Forty two." - The answer to the Great Question of Life, The Universe and Everything, Deep-Thought.
• "Share and Enjoy" - Company motto of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division
• "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" - Final message from the Dolphins, as they escape just prior to Earth's destruction
• "To bang rocks together." - The way to become a civilised life-form, as broadcast on sub-ether radio.
• "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?"
• "With a rubber duck, one's never alone." - Captain of the load of useless bloody loonies from Golgafrincham
• "The knack of flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
• Old Man: "It goes like this. Let's see now: '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."
  Arthur: "Hmmm, Well, thank you - "
  Old Man: "There's another prayer that goes with it that's very important, so you'd better jot this down, too."
  Arthur: "OK."
  Old Man: "It goes, 'Lord, lord, lord...' It's best to put that bit in, just in case. You can never be too sure 'Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen...' And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from missing out that last part.'"
• "How can I tell, than the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?" - The Ruler of the Universe

Last Chance To See

• "[Mark Carwardine's] role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise."
• "[The aye-aye] looks a little like a large cat with a bat's ears, a beaver's teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder."
• "Here the man in blue crimplene accosted us once more but we patiently explained to him that he could fuck off."
• "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."

The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul

• "Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort."
• "It was a battered yellow Citroen 2CV which had had one careful owner but also three suicidally reckless ones."
• "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
• "Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila."

The Meaning of Liff (Co-written with John Lloyd)

• "AALST (n.) One who changes his name to be further to the front"
• "ABOYNE (vb.) To beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him."
• "CLIXBY (adj.) Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly uninformative."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future

• " It'd be like a bunch of rivers, the Amazon and the Missisippi and the Congo asking how the Atlantic Ocean might affect them… and the answer is of course is that they won't be rivers anymore just currents in the ocean."
  • On his response to representatives of the music, publishing and broadcasting industries who asked Douglas at a conference how he thought technological changes will affect them.

Attributed:

• "Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game."
• "There is no problem so complicated that you cannot find a very simple answer to it if you look at it in the right way."
• "I may be a pretty sad case, but I don't write jokes in base 13!"
  • Douglas Adams, referring to the theory that the disparity between the question and answer of life, the universe and everything is an obscure math joke on his part.
• "'Stotting' is jumping upward with all four legs simultaneously. My advice: do not die until you've seen a large black poodle stotting in the snow." - "The Salmon of the Doubt"

Profession

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