Great Throughts Treasury

"Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe there is a reason."

"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."

"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 much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially."

"DETCHANT (n.) That part of a hymn (usually a few notes at the end of a verse) where the tune goes so high or low that you suddenly have to change octaves to accommodate it."

"Did I do anything wrong today, he said, or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?"

"Dirk turned on the car wipers, which grumbled because they didn't have quite enough rain to wipe away, so he turned them off again. Rain quickly speckled the windscreen. He turned on the wipers again, but they still refused to feel that the exercise was worthwhile, and scraped and squeaked in protest."

"Dirk was unused to making quite such a miniscule impact on anybody. He checked to be sure that he did have his huge leather coat and his absurd red hat on and that he was properly and dramatically silhouetted by the light on the doorway. He felt momentarily deflated and said, Er... by was of self-introduction, but it didn't get the boy's attention. He didn't like this. The kid was deliberately and maliciously watching television at him."

"Dirk was, for one of the few times in a life of exuberantly prolific loquacity, wordless."

"Do you find coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?"

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

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

"Don't Panic."

"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 we don't expect to see."

"Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game."

"During this century (the twentieth) we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport - the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head. I expect that history will show normal mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. 'Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn't do anything? Didn't everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?' Yes, child, that's why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.' What was the Restoration again, please, miss?' The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back."

"Earth: mostly harmless."

"Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody."

"Even he, to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart."

"Even the evil-looking bird perched on a rod in the bar had stopped screeching out the names and addresses of local contract killers, which was a service it provided for free."

"Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else becomes eerily easy."

"Everything, in any form, see, hear or feel is specific to you. You create a universe feeling it, so that all of the universe you perceive is specific to you."

"Exactly! said Deep Thought. So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means."

"FAIRYMOUNT (vb. n.) Polite word for buggery."

"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."

"Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free. Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the furthest reaches of Galactic space. 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. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged...In these enlightened days, of course, no one believes a word of it."

"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 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 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, 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 which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and 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 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. And then one day, 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 cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realised 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 nalied to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and so the idea was lost forever."

"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."

"Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth."

"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 on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause."

"First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at all."

"First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII, and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure."

"Five years is believed while completely blind, all of a sudden, in fact, a very large hat wearing only a man who was too shocked to realize that."

"Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."

"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen."

"For as long as he could remember, he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there."

"For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while."

"For instance, 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—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the 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."

"For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact 42- and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was."

"For us, there is no longer a fundamental mystery about Life. It is all the process of extraordinary eruptions of information, and it is information which gives us this fantastically rich, complex world in which we live; but at the same time that we've discovered that we are destroying it at a rate that has no precedent in history, unless you go back to the point when we are hit by an asteroid!"

"For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says You are here."

"Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying Blood...blood...blood...blood..."

"Ford looked at him severely. And no sneaky knocking down Mr. Dent's house whilst he's away, alright? he said. The mere thought, growled Mr Prosser, hadn't even begun to speculate, he continued, settling himself back, about the merest possibility of crossing my mind."

"Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh."

"Ford was beginning to behave rather strangely, or rather not actually beginning to behave strangely but beginning to behave in a way that was strangely different from the other strange ways in which he more regularly behaved."

"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."

"Ford... you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."

"Freedom, he said out loud... I can't cope with it.."

"From another direction he felt the sensation of being a sheep startled by a flying saucer, but it was virtually indistinguishable from the feeling of being a sheep startled by anything else it ever encountered, for they were creatures who learned very little on their journey through life, and would be startled to see the sun rising in the morning, and astonished by all the green stuff in the fields."

"Funny how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does."

"Galbrokna mattress. This is the noise emitted by alive blatoobitavasht mattress that is deeply deeply moved by the story of someone's personal tragedy that had just heard. The word also according Ultrapalniya Maksimegalonski dictionary in any language ever existed, could mean noise issued by the Master of the Sublime Sanvalvuag Hollop when he discovered that the second consecutive year, forget the birthday of his wife. But since there is only one Lord of the Sublime Sanvalvuag Hollop and he never married, the word is used only in a negative or speculative sense, and there's an eternal rising opinion, which states that Ultrapalniyat Maksimegalonski Dictionary does not deserve caravan of trucks necessary for moving mikrosbitoto edition of the consumer. Strangely, the dictionary does not mention the word podplyaskvashto which means a pattern of someone who podplyaskva"