Great Throughts Treasury

"Human beings who are almost unique (among animals) in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, yet are also remarkable in their apparent disinclination to do so."

"Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner."

"I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous."

"I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing."

"I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand."

"I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no he'd come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me."

"I begged her, 'Please don't leave me stranded in the middle of some primitive zarking forest with no medical help and a head injury. I could be in serious trouble and so could she.'What did she say? She hit me on the head with the rock again, Ford responded curtly. I think i can confirm that was my daughter. Sweet kid. You have to get to know her, said Arthur. She eases up, does she? No, but you get a better sense of when to duck."

"I came all this way, he thought Zaphod, all these troubles, all these beach-side-come-lay-wonderful-time-geçirememeler, well, but what for?"

"I come in peace...Take me to your lizard."

"I didn't notice I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals."

"I don’t know what I’m looking for."

"I don’t know, apathetic bloody planet, I’ve no sympathy at all."

"I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it."

"I don't go to mythical places with strange men."

"I don't know what this great thing I'm meant to be doing is, and it looks to me as if I was supposed not to know. And I resent that, right? The old me knew. The old me cared. Fine, so far so good. Except that the old me cared so much that he actually got inside his own brain--my own brain--and locked off the bits that knew and cared, because if I knew and cared I wouldn't be able to do it... But this former self of mine killed himself off, didn't he, by changing my brain? Okay, that was his choice. This new me has its own choices to make, and by a strange coincidence those choices involve not knowing and not caring about this big number, whatever it is. That's what he wanted, that's what he got. Except this old self of mine tired to leave himself in control, leaving orders for me in the bit of my brain he locked off. Well, I don't want to know, and I don't want to hear them. That's my choice. I'm not going to be anybody's puppet, particularly not my own... The old me is dead! [...] Killed himself! The dead shouldn't hang about trying t0 interfere with the living."

"I don't like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don't believe in God, or at least not in the one we've invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they've invented in America who supply their servants with toupees, television stations and, most importantly, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world."

"I don't want to die now! he yelled. I've still got a headache! I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it!"

"I find that writing is a constant battle with exactly the same problems you've always had."

"I get a headache when I try just runterzudenken myself to your level."

"I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand."

"I have always been absurdly, ridiculously tall. To give you an idea- when we went on school trips to Interesting and Improving Places, the form-master wouldn't say Meet under the clock tower, or Meet under the War Memorial, but Meet under Adams."

"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?"

"I have nothing to offer you' said Hactar faintly, 'but tricks of the light. It is possible to be comfortable with tricks of the light, though, if that is all you have.' His voice evanesced, and in the dark a long, velvet paisley-covered sofa coalesced into hazy shape... At least, if it wasn't real, it did support them, and as that is what sofas are supposed to do, this, by any test that mattered, was a real sofa."

"I have the brain the size of a planet and you want to talk to me about life."

"I incline to the quantum mechanical view in this matter. My theory is that your cat is not lost, but that his waveform has temporarily collapsed and must be restored. Schrödinger. Planck. And so on. -- Dirk Gently"

"I like the cover, he said. Don't Panic. It's the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day."

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

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

"I only decide my Universe. My Universe is my eyes and my ears. Everything else is hearsay."

"I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good."

"I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be."

"I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much, of course - the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end."

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer."

"I refuse to prove that I exist, says God, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. So it isn’t the original building? I had asked my Japanese guide. But yes, of course it is, he insisted, rather surprised at my question. But it’s burnt down? Yes. Twice. Many times. And rebuilt. Of course. It is an important and historic building. With completely new materials. But of course. It was burnt down. So how can it be the same building? It is always the same building. I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself."

"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style."

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

"I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggy's heart away and I got Sidney's leg."

"I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it's less good than what I do, there's no point in reading it, if it's better than what I do it makes me depressed"

"I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer."

"I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?"

"I think he probably wants you to play Scrabble with him again,' said Ford, 'he's pointing to the letters.' 'Probably spelt crzjgrdwldiwdc again, I keep on telling him there's only one g in crzjgrdwldiwdc."

"I think that growing up in a crowded continent like Europe with an awful lot of competing claims, ideas, cultures, and systems of thought we have, perforce, developed a more sophisticated notion of what the word freedom means than I see much evidence of in America. To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that in Europe we're probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot."

"I think we have different value systems. —Arthur Well mine's better. —Ford"

"I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed."

"I wanted to be John Cleese. It took me some time to realise that the job was taken."

"I was created to fulfill a function and I failed in it. I negated my own existence."

"I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one."

"I went to Cambridge University. I took a number of baths - and a degree in English. I worried a lot about girls and what had happened to my bike. Later I became I writer and worked on a lot of things that were almost incredibly successful but in fact just failed to see the light of day. Other writers will know what I mean."

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