Douglas Adams

“I'd far rather be happy than right any day.”

“It faintly irritated him that Zaphod had to impose some ludicrous fantasy on to the scene to make it work for him. All this Margrathea nonsense seemed juvenile. Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

“There is a piece of me that likes to fondly imagine my maverick and rebellious nature. But, more accurately, I like to have a nice and cosy institution that I can rub up against a little bit.”

“I'm very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic' refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson."Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson?No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.”

“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

“If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.”

“He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and he would rather have had a chaperon.”

“Arthur: If I asked you where the hell we were, would I regret it?Ford: We're safe.Arthur: Oh good.Ford: We're in a small galley cabin in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet. that I wasn't previously aware of.”

“How many roads must a man walk down?”

“I have detected disturbances in the wash.''The wash?''The space-time wash.''Are we talking about some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?''Eddies in the space-time continuum.''Ah...is he. Is he.''What?''Er, who is Eddy, then, exactly?”

“If I ever meet myself,' said Zaphod, 'I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me.”

“Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was."Is there any tea on this spaceship?" he asked.”

“He let the curtain drop and the terrible light that had played on his features went off to play somewhere more healthy.”

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

“We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn’t recognize huge wodges of human experience. Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn’t—or wasn’t—a word for it, everyone thinks it’s something that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is “woking.”

“In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”

“Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.”

“Zaphod had never heard of this. He believed that he had heard of all the fun things in the Galaxy, so he assumed that the Total Perspective Vortex was not fun.”

“Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious.Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry. He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her.“Why’s this fish so bloody good?” he demanded, angrily.”

“We have a saying up here. ‘Life is wasted on the living.”