Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

Beauty doesn’t have to be about anything. What’s a vase about? What’s a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart’s Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that...

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.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem,...

Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since.

The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth — when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make...

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

The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went...

Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out...

And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you’re doing the whole thing over again, but this...

The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, but in fact the message was this: So long and...

You come to me for advice, but you can’t cope with anything you don’t recognize. Hmmm. So we’ll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh Well, business...

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...

American Atheists: What message would you like to send to your Atheist fans?Douglas Adams: Hello! How are you?

We’re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford.”…””And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.””I care about lots of things,” said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly...

Trillian did a little research in the ship’s copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness. “Go to it,” it said, “and good luck.

My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

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?

An island, on the other hand, is small. There are fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough...

One moment I was sitting in your ship feeling very depressed, and the next moment I was standing here feeling utterly miserable. An Improbability Field I expect.

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.

Ford, you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.

There is a particular disdain with which Siamese cats regard you. Anyone who has walked in on the Queen cleaning her teeth will be familiar with the feeling.

Tell me the story,” said Fenchurch firmly. “You arrived at the station.””I was about twenty minutes early. I’d got the time of the train wrong.” “Get on with it.” Fenchurch laughed.”So I bought a newspaper,...

In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship—he merely left his office late one morning, and has never returned since. Though well over a century has now passed, many members of the Guide staff still...

There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the...

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with...

The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.

Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.

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...

In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word ‘safe’ that I wasn’t previously aware of

If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn’t think twice about buying something oven-ready become...

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 chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

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,...

But she was finding it increasingly easy to believe that God, if there was a God, and if it was remotely possible that any godlike being who could order the disposition of particles at the...

Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God’s earth, and one’s first impulse, standing...

Don’t blame you,” said Marvin and counted five hundred and ninety-seven thousand million sheep before falling asleep again a second later.

It’s the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this...

Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.

It’s no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase “As pretty as an airport” appear

Just supposing,” he said, “just supposing” –he didn’t know what was coming next, so he thought he’d just sit back and listen–“that there was some extraordinary way in which you were very important to me,...

The deep roar of the ocean.The break of waves on farther shores that thought can find.The silent thunders of the deep.And from among it, voices calling, and yet not voices, humming trillings, wordlings, and half-articulated...

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.

A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.