This weekend, it suddenly occurred to me that there are two types of clever people in this world. There are people who come up with original, clever ideas, and then there are people who come up with no original ideas, but nonetheless seem clever by virtue of the fact that they recognize the cleverness in other people’s ideas, and then quote those clever ideas at appropriate intervals. As I was clever enough to identify this distinction, I’ve decided to post a series of periodic blogs capitalizing on the clever quotes of others. Because Douglas Adams was one of the most inspirational figures to me when I was writing my book, it seems only appropriate to begin my blog series with his clever quotes.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up.
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.
Arthur: “You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.” City Counselman: “But the plans were on display…” Arthur: “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” City Counselman: “That’s the display department.” Arthur: “With a torch.” City Counselman: “Ah, well the lights had probably gone.” Arthur: “So had the stairs.” City Counselman: “But look, you found the notice didn’t you?” Arthur: “Yes . . . yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of The Leopard.’”
“This must be Thursday,” said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer, “I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
The Encyclopedia Galactica has much to say on the theory and practice of time travel, most of which is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t spent at least four lifetimes studying advanced hypermathematics, and since it was impossible to do this before time travel was invented, there is a certain amount of confusion as to how the idea was arrived at in the first place. One rationalization of this problem states that time travel was, by its very nature, discovered simultaneously at all periods of history, but this is clearly bunk. The trouble is that a lot of history is now quite clearly bunk as well.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
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 first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”
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.
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.
Even he, to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart.
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-two 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. This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.