My favourite quotes from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

A few months ago, I wrote a post on my favourite and funny quotes from Murderbot Diaries. It's my favourite Sci-Fi series right now. I'm currently reading the sixth book in the series, Fugitive Telemetry. 

I just love Murderbot and Marvin. Both of them are the reason why Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Murderbot Diaries are so popular. I still wish I can go back to the first time I read this series. Douglas Adams is a genius when it comes to humour. 

Anyway, I've already written a post on quotes from Murderbot Diaries here, in case you want to check it out.

Now, I want to share some of my favourite quotes from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in this post.

1. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

1. “You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."

"Why, what did she tell you?"

"I don't know, I didn't listen.” 

2. 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.

3. All through my life, I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."

"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.

4. Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.

5. And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

2. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

1. There is a theory which states that if ever anyone 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.

2. Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

3. Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.

4. “Good evening,” it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, “I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?” 

5. To explain-since every piece of matter in the universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every Sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the total perspective vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

6. Any form of transport which involved tearing you apart atom by atom, flinging those atoms through the sub-ether, and then jamming them back together again just when they were getting their first taste of freedom for years had to be bad news.

3. Life, the Universe and Everything

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.

4. Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other piece of paper in any other part of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm.

5. 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.” 

4. So long and thanks for all the fish

1. This man is the bee's knees, Arthur, he is the wasp's nipples. He is, I would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous zones of every major flying insect of the Western world.

2. He couldn’t catch her because this was London, and not a million miles from here, seven hundred and fifty-six, to be exact, in Pisa, Galileo had clearly demonstrated that two falling bodies fell at exactly the same rate of acceleration irrespective of their relative weights.

3. The wind flicked about a little like the tail of a horse that's trying to decide what sort of mood it's in tonight, and a bell somewhere chimed midnight.

4. I searched my soul and discovered that there was nothing anywhere in my upbringing, experience, or even primal instincts to tell me how to react to someone who has quite simply, calmly, sitting right there in front of me, stolen one of my biscuits.

5. There was a sort of gallery structure in the roof space which held a bed and also a bathroom which you could actually swing a cat in. But only if it was a reasonably patient cat and didn’t mind a few nasty cracks about the head.

5. Mostly Harmless

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

2. “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.” 

3. Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyways, so their opinion can and should be discounted.

4. The word was out that maybe, just maybe, a British accent would fit. The hair, the skin tone and the bridgework would have to be up to American network standards, but there had been a lot of British accents up there thanking their mothers for their Oscars, a lot of British accents singing on Broadway, and some unusually big audiences tuning in to British accents in a wig on Masterpiece Theatre.

5. Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light-years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you travelled. This will come to you as a profound personal shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister.

So, these were some of favourite moments from the book. Of course, there are many more but I can't include all of them as the list would be endless. I hope you had a good laugh. 

What were your favourite moments that made you chuckle? Do mention them in the comments.

Books by Adam Douglas

1. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - https://amzn.to/3jtlhCJ

2. Restaurant at the end of the Universe - https://amzn.to/3Agmxiu

3. Life, the Universe and Everything - https://amzn.to/2TgTwTj

4. So long and thanks for all the fish - https://amzn.to/3jCODPb

5. Mostly Harmless - https://amzn.to/3dyXu0d

6. And another thing - https://amzn.to/3qBC4oG