Comedy novels

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

"Where shall we see a better daughter, or a kinder sister, or a truer friend?"

"Better be without sense, than misapply it as you do."

"It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her."

"Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief."

"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."

"A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable, old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else."

"There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves."

"The truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be."

"There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart."

"It was a delightful visit—perfect, in being much too short."

"There are secrets in all families."

"Respect for right conduct is felt by every body."

"Nobody who has not been in the interior of a family can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be."

"It is such a happiness when good people get together—and they always do."

"Harriet was one of those, who, having once begun, would be always in love."

"Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of."

"What is right to be done cannot be done too soon."

"There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person."

"I do not know whether it ought to be so, but certainly silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.—It depends upon the character of those who handle it. Mr. Knightley, he is not a trifling, silly young man. If he were, he would have done this differently. He would either have gloried in the achievement, or been ashamed of it. There would have been either the ostentation of a coxcomb, or the evasions of a mind too weak to defend its own vanities.—No, I am perfectly sure that he is not trifling or silly."

"Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable."

"A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer."

"The ladies here probably exchanged looks which meant, "Men never know when things are dirty or not;" and the gentlemen perhaps thought each to himself, "Women will have their little nonsense and needless cares.""

"I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise."

"Jane Fairfax is a very charming young woman - but not even Jane Fairfax is perfect. She has a fault. She has not the open temper which a man would wish for in a wife."

"Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does."

"Young ladies are delicate plants. They should take care of their health and their complexion."

"If things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next."

"Can you trust me with such flatterers?—Does my vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?"

"General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be."

"It was badly done, indeed! You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her–and before her niece, too–and before others, many of whom (certainly some,) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her.–This is not pleasant to you, Emma–and it is very far from pleasant to me; but I must, I will,–I will tell you truths while I can."

"She was vexed beyond what could have been expressed—almost beyond what she could conceal. Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life. She was most forcibly struck. The truth of his representation there was no denying. She felt it at her heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates! How could she have exposed herself to such ill opinion in any one she valued! And how suffer him to leave her without saying one word of gratitude, of concurrence, of common kindness!"

"A man would always wish to give a woman a better home than the one he takes her from; and he who can do it, where there is no doubt of her regard, must, I think, be the happiest of mortals."

"'I cannot make speeches, Emma:' he soon resumed; and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing.—'If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am.—You hear nothing but truth from me.—I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.—Bear with the truths I would tell you now, dearest Emma, as well as you have borne with them. The manner, perhaps, may have as little to recommend them. God knows, I have been a very indifferent lover.—But you understand me.—Yes, you see, you understand my feelings—and will return them if you can. At present, I ask only to hear, once to hear your voice.'"

"Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material."

"What did she say? Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. She said enough to show there need not be despair – and to invite him to say more himself."

"It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble."

"One man’s style must not be the rule of another’s."

"Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home."

"The authors would like to join the demon Crowley in dedicating this book to the memory of G. K. Chesterton. A man who knew what was going on."

"It was a nice day. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one."

""A demon can get into real trouble, doing the right thing." He nudged the angel. "Funny if we both got it wrong, eh? Funny if I did the good thing and you did the bad one, eh?" "Not really," said Aziraphale."

"GOOD OMENS : A Narrative of Certain Events occurring in the last eleven years of human history, in strict accordance as shall be shewn with: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter Compiled and edited, with Footnotes of an Educational Nature and Precepts for the Wise, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett."

"Crowley (An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards)"

"God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players*, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."

"TV Show version : I play an ineffable game of my own devising. For everyone else, it's like playing poker in a pitch dark room for infinite stakes with a Dealer who won´t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."

"It wasn't a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but that's the weather for you."

"Many phenomena — wars, plagues, sudden audits — have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for Exhibit A."

"All tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums."

"Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn't pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn't understand. They'd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or value-added tax. Or Manchester."

"It'd be a funny old world, he reflected, if demons went round trusting one another."

"That's how it goes, you think you're on top of the world, and suddenly they spring Armageddon on you. The Great War, the Last Battle. Heaven versus Hell, three rounds, one Fall, no submission. And that'd be that. No more world. That's what the end of the world meant. No more world. Just endless Heaven or, depending who won, endless Hell. Crowley didn't know which was worse."

"He'd been an angel once. He hadn't meant to Fall. He'd just hung around with the wrong people."

"The Chattering Order of Saint Beryl is under a vow to emulate Saint Beryl at all times, except on Tuesday afternoons, for half an hour, when the nuns are permitted to shut up, and, if they wish, to play table tennis."

"Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow."

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."

"He rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon. Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse."

"Just when you'd think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger."

"He stared down at the golden curls of the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness. "You know," he concluded, after a while, "I think he actually looks like an Adam.""

"Technically Aziraphale was a Principality, but people made jokes about that these days."

"Buggre Alle this for a Larke I amme sick to mye Hart of typefettinge. Master Biltonn if no Gentelmann, and Master Scagges noe more than a tighte fisted Southwarke Knobbefticke."

"There you are then", said Crowley, sitting back. "Whole sea bubbling, poor old dolphins so much seafood gumbo, no one giving a damn. Same with gorillas. Whoops, they say, sky gone all red, stars crashing to ground, what they putting in the bananas these days?"

"There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of manmade evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath astink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker . . . This dog would make even a dog like that slink nonchalantly behind the sofa and pretend to be extremely preoccupied with its rubber bone. It was already growling, and the growl was a low, rumbling snarl of spring-coiled menace, the sort of growl that starts in the back of one throat and ends up in someone else's."

"It leapt the hedge and padded across the field beyond. A grazing bull eyed it for a moment, weighed its chances, then strolled hurriedly toward the opposite hedge."

"The owner of a voice like that would be the sort of person who, before making a plastic model kit, would not only separate and count all the pieces before commencing, as per the instructions, but also paint all the bits that needed painting first and leave them to dry properly prior to construction. All that separated this voice from chartered accountancy was a matter of time."

"It's Tchaikovsky's 'Another One Bites the Dust'," said Crowley, closing his eyes as they went through Slough. To while away the time as they crossed the sleeping Chilterns, they also listened to William Byrd's "We Are the Champions" and Beethoven's "I Want To Break Free." Neither were as good as Vaughan Williams's "Fat-Bottomed Girls."

"Apart from, of course, the fact that the world was an amazing interesting place which they both wanted to enjoy for as long as possible, there were few things that the two of them agreed on, but they did see eye to eye about some of those people who, for one reason or another, were inclined to worship the Prince of Darkness. Crowley always found them embarrassing. You couldn't actually be rude to them, but you couldn't help feeling about them the same way that, say, a Vietnam veteran would feel about someone who wears combat gear to Neighborhood Watch meetings."

"There were people who called themselves Satanists who made Crowley squirm. It wasn't just the things they did, it was the way they blamed it all on Hell. They'd come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully-functioning human brain could conceive, then shout "The Devil Made Me Do It" and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was that the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn't have to. That was what some humans found hard to understand. Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind."

"Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men."

"Any prowling maniac would have had more than his work cut out if he had accosted Anathema Device. She was a witch, after all. And precisely because she was a witch, and therefore sensible, she put little faith in protective amulets and spells; she saved it all for a foot-long bread knife which she kept in her belt."

""What're they playing at?" said Aziraphale. "I don't know," said Crowley, "but I think it's called silly buggers." His tone suggested that he could play, too. And do it better."

""I think the maggots were a bit over the top, myself," said Aziraphale, but without much rancor."

""I'm not occult," said Aziraphale. "Angels aren't occult. We're ethereal." "Whatever," snapped Crowley, too worried to argue."

"All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that." "Terrible." "Nothing but dust and fundamentalists." "That was nasty." "Sorry. Couldn't resist it."

"In a climate-controlled cabinet in one corner was the original scroll in the shaky handwriting of St. John the Divine of Patmos, whose "Revelation" had been the alltime best seller. Aziraphale had found him a nice chap, if a bit too fond of odd mushrooms."

"The redhaired woman in the corner of the hotel bar was the most successful war correspondent in the world. She now had a passport in the name of Carmine Zuigiber; and she went where the wars were. Well. More or less. Actually she went where the wars weren't. She'd already been where the wars were."

"Red signed the receipt pad, illegibly, then printed her name. The name she wrote was not Carmine Zuigiber. It was a much shorter name."

"The men in the room suddenly realized that they didn't want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close. And as she held her sword, she smiled like a knife."

"I bet you don't have to be Spanish to be the Spanish Inquisition," said Adam. "I bet it's like Scottish eggs or American hamburgers. It just has to look Spanish. We've just got to make it look Spanish. Then everyone would know it's the Spanish Inquisition."

"It was a very good torture, everyone agreed. The trouble was getting the putative witch off it."

"Anathema didn't only believe in leylines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rain forests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island. She didn't compartmentalize her beliefs. They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion. On any scale of mountain moving it shifted at least point five of an alp.*"

"It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe. Somewhere in Adam's sleeping head, a butterfly had emerged."

"It might, or might not, have helped Anathema get a clear view of things if she'd been allowed to spot the very obvious reason why she couldn't see Adam's aura. It was for the same reason that people in Trafalgar Square can't see England."

"He didn't say "That's weird." He wouldn't have said "That's weird" if a flock of sheep had cycled past playing violins. It wasn't the sort of thing a responsible engineer said."

"Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong; Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort. But he was intelligent. And it was an angelic intelligence which, while not being particularly higher than human intelligence, is much broader and has the advantage of having thousands of years of practice."

"Sometimes he would scribble something on a sheet of paper by his side. It was covered in symbols which only eight other people in the world would have been able to comprehend; two of them had won Nobel prizes, and one of the other six dribbled a lot and wasn't allowed anything sharp because of what he might do with it."

"There was a time when witchfinders were respected, although it didn't last very long."

"He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist."

"This is how Newton Pulsifer looked as a man: if he went into a phone booth and changed, he might manage to come out looking like Clark Kent."

"Gather ye ryte close, goode people. Come close untyl the fire near scorch ye, for I charge ye that alle must see how thee last true wytch in England dies. For wytch I am, for soe I am judged, yette I knoe not what my true Cryme may be. And therefore let myne deathe be a messuage to the worlde. Gather ye ryte close, I saye, and marke well the fate of alle who meddle with suche as theye do none understande."

"Newt had never been in a woman's bedroom before, but he sensed that this was one largely by a combination of soft smells. There was a hint of talcum and lily-of-the-valley, and no rank suggestion of old T-shirts that had forgotten what the inside of a tumbledryer looked like."

"Anathema Device," said Anathema. "I'm an occultist, but that's just a hobby. I'm really a witch. Well done. You're half an hour late," she added, handing him a small sheet of cardboard, "so you'd better read this. It'll save a lot of time."

"Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys...""

"Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold."

"Most psychic abilities are caused by a simple lack of temporal focus, and the mind of Agnes Nutter was so far adrift in Time that she was considered pretty mad even by the standards of seventeenth-century Lancashire, where mad prophetesses were a growth industry."

"She managed to come up with the kind of predictions that you can only understand after the thing has happened," said Anathema. "Like 'Do Notte Buye Betamacks.' That was a prediction for 1972."

"Most of the time she comes up with such an oblique reference that you can't work it out until it's gone past, and then it all slots into place. And she didn't know what was going to be important or not, so it's all a bit hit and miss."

"You see, it's not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means. Agnes was like someone looking at a huge picture down a tiny little tube. She wrote down what seemed like good advice based on what she understood of the tiny little glimpses."

""What I'm trying to say," she said patiently, "is that Agnes didn't see the future. That's just a metaphor. She remembered it. Not very well, of course, and by the time it'd been filtered through her own understanding it's often a bit confused."

"When most people said "I'm psychic, you see," they meant "I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/ talk to my budgie"; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have."

"Anyway, there isn't any evil here. That's what I don't understand. There's just love."

"He pulled on the gloves and gingerly took the flask, and the tongs, and the bucket — and, as an afterthought, he grabbed the plant mister from beside a luxuriant rubber plant — and headed for his office, walking like a man carrying a thermos flask full of something that might cause, if he dropped it or even thought about dropping it, the sort of explosion that impels graybeards to make statements like "And where this crater is now, once stood the City of Wah-Shing-Ton," in SF B-movies."

"Plan A had worked. Plan B had failed. Everything depended on Plan C, and there was one drawback to this: he had only ever planned as far as B."

"Just for a moment he had entertained the possibility; that was where Crowley had got him. It was just possible that Hell was testing him. That Crowley was more than he seemed. Hastur was paranoid, which was simply a sensible and well-adjusted reaction to living in Hell, where they really were all out to get you."

"Demons aren't bound by physics. If you take the long view, the universe is just something small and round, like those waterfilled balls which produce a miniature snowstorm when you shake them."

"For those of angel stock or demon breed, size, and shape, and composition, are simply options."

"Other songs he had written included: "Happy Mister Jesus," "Jesus, Can I Come and Stay at Your Place?" "That Ol' Fiery Cross," "Jesus is the Sticker on the Bumper of My Soul," and "When I'm Swept Up by the Rapture Grab the Wheel of My Pick-up.""

"It was then that Marvin got religion. Not the quiet, personal kind, that involves doing good deeds and living a better life; not even the kind that involves putting on a suit and ringing people's doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money."

"The world is a lot more complicated than most people believe. Many people believed, for example, that Marvin was not a true Believer because he made so much money out of it. They were wrong. He believed with all his heart. He believed utterly, and spent a lot of the money that flooded in on what he really thought was the Lord's work."

"MORTALS CAN HOPE FOR DEATH, OR FOR REDEMPTION. YOU CAN HOPE FOR NOTHING. ALL YOU CAN HOPE FOR IS THE MERCY OF HELL. "Yeah?" JUST OUR LITTLE JOKE."

""You're Hell's Angels. . . What chapter are you from, then?" REVELATIONS . . . CHAPTER SIX."

"Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking toward Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty to Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping But Secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People traveled with them."

"She finished drying herself, and started picking up clothes from the floor, and, unselfconsciously, pulling them on. Newt, a man who was prepared to wait half an hour for a free changing cubicle at the swimming baths, rather than face the possibility of having to disrobe in front of another human being, found himself vaguely shocked, and deeply thrilled."

"Now, I know what you're thinking, Sergeant Shadwell. You're thinking that any second now this head is going to go round and round, and I'm going to start vomiting pea soup. Well, I'm not. I'm not a demon. And I'd like you to listen to what I have to say."

"The Antichrist is alive on earth at this moment, Sergeant. He is bringing about Armageddon, the Day of Judgement, even if he himself does not know it. Heaven and Hell are both preparing for war, and it's all going to be very messy."

"Listen," croaked Skuzz. "Got something important to tell you. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse . . . they're right bastards, all four of them."

"Cars, in theory, give you a terrifically fast method of traveling from place to place. Traffic jams, on the other hand, give you a terrific opportunity to stay still."

"Okay, so Hell was down on him. So the world was ending. So the Cold War was over and the Great War was starting for real. So the odds against him were higher than a vanload of hippies on a blotterful of Owlsley's Old Original. There was still a chance. It was all a matter of being in the right place at the right time."

"The technical term for it is infrablack. It can be seen quite easily under experimental conditions. To perform the experiment simply select a healthy brick wall with a good runup, and, lowering your head, charge. The color that flashes in bursts behind your eyes, behind the pain, just before you die, is infrablack."

"Odegra. Nothing could cross it and survive. Nothing mortal, anyway. And he wasn't sure what it would do to a demon. It couldn't kill him, but it wouldn't be pleasant."

"A street of light will screem, the black chariot of the Serpente will flayme, and a Queene wille sing quickfilveres songes no moar."

"It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met. It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and the wind at eighty miles per hour. That would do it every time."

"Adam opened his mouth and screamed. It was a sound that a merely mortal throat should not have been able to utter; it wound out of the quarry, mingled with the storm, caused the clouds to curdle into new and unpleasant shapes. It went on and on. It resounded around the universe, which is a good deal smaller than physicists would believe. It rattled the celestial spheres. It spoke of loss, and it did not stop for a very long time."

"Pepper? Wensley? Brian? Come back here. It's all right. It's all right. I know everything now. And you've got to help me. Otherwise it's all goin' to happen. It's really all goin' to happen. It's all goin' to happen, if we don't do somethin'."

"You've got to help me sort it out," said Adam. "People've been tryin' to sort it out for thousands of years, but we've got to sort it out now."

"No one paid any attention to them. Perhaps they saw nothing at all. Perhaps they saw what their minds were instructed to see, because the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don't want to be seen, and has got so good at not seeing that it often manages not to see them even when they abound on every side."

"Hey," he said, but much more weakly this time, "did any of them kids have some space alien with a face like a friendly turd in a bike basket?"

"Adam glanced up. In one sense there was just clear air overhead. In another, stretching off to infinity, were the hosts of Heaven and Hell, wingtip to wingtip. If you looked really closely, and had been specially trained, you could tell the difference."

"You just had to decide who your friends really were."

"There was a tearing sound. Death's robe split and his wings unfolded. Angel's wings. But not of feathers. They were wings of night, wings that were shapes cut through the matter of creation into the darkness underneath, in which a few distant lights glimmered, lights that may have been stars or may have been something entirely else."

"He is Not that Which He Says he Is"

"In bunkers under Novya Zemla men found that the fuses they were frantically trying to pull out came away in their hands at last; in bunkers under Wyoming and Nebraska, men in fatigues stopped screaming and waving guns at one another, and would have had a beer if alcohol had been allowed in missile bases. It wasn't, but they had one anyway."

"Crowley was not used to people identifying him so readily, but Adam stared at him as though Crowley's entire life history was pasted inside the back of his skull and he, Adam, was reading it. For an instant he knew real terror. He'd always thought the sort he'd felt before was the genuine article, but that was mere abject fear beside this new sensation. Those Below could make you cease to exist by, well, hurting you in unbearable amounts, but this boy could not only make you cease to exist merely by thinking about it, but probably could arrange matters so that you never had existed at all."

"You think wars get started because some old duke gets shot, or someone cuts off someone's ear, or someone's sited their missiles in the wrong place. It's not like that. That's just, well, just reasons, which haven't got anything to do with it. What really causes wars is two sides that can't stand the sight of one another and the pressure builds up and up and then anything will cause it. Anything at all."

""I don't see what's so t'riffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people," said Adam severely. "Anyway, if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive."

"But you can't just leave it at that!" said Anathema, pushing forward. "Think of all things you could do! Good things!" "Like what?" said Adam suspiciously. "Well ... you could bring all the whales back, to start with." He put his head on one side. "An' that'd stop people killing them, would it?" She hesitated. It would have been nice to say yes. "An' if people do start killing 'em, what would you have me do about 'em?" said Adam. "No. I reckon I'm getting the hang of this now. Once I start messing around like that, there'd be no stoppin' it. Seems to me, the only sensible thing is for people to know if they kill a whale, they've got a dead whale."

"You can't be certain that what's happening right now isn't exactly right, from an ineffable point of view."

"God does not play games with His loyal servants," said the Metatron, but in a worried tone of voice. "Whooo-eee," said Crowley. "Where have you been?"

"We seem to have survived," he said. "Just imagine how terrible it might have been if we'd been at all competent."

"That's not Beelzebub!" he shouted, above the noise of the wind. "That's Him. His Father! This isn't Armageddon, this is personal."

"Crowley started to argue, and realized that he hadn't anything. There was nothing he could lose that he hadn't lost already. They couldn't do anything worse to him than he had coming to him already. He felt free at last. He also felt under the seat and found a tire iron. It wouldn't be any good, but then, nothing would. In fact it'd be much more terrible facing the Adversary with anything like a decent weapon. That way you might have a bit of hope, which would make it worse."

"I'd just like to say," he said, "if we don't get out of this, that . . . I'll have known, deep down inside, that there was a spark of goodness in you." "That's right," said Crowley bitterly. "Make my day."

"Maybe it's all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it. You, me, him, everything. Some great big test to see if what you've built all works properly, eh? You start thinking: it can't be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire. And don't bother to answer. If we could understand, we wouldn't be us. Because it's all — all — " INEFFABLE, said the figure feeding the ducks."

"Nothin' wrong with witchfinding. I'd like to be a witchfinder. It's just, well you've got to take it in turns. Today we'll go out witchfinding, an' tomorrow we could hide, an it'd be the witches' turn to find US..."

"There would be other summers, but there would never be one like this. Ever again. Better make the most of it, then."

"For a fraction of an instant Adam saw, outlined in the smoke, a handsome, female face. A face that hadn't been seen on Earth for over three hundred years. Agnes Nutter winked at him."

"There never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating 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-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 living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

"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."

"In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."

"“First I’ve heard of it,” said Arthur, “why’s it got to be built?” Mr. Prosser shook his finger at him for a bit, then stopped and put it away again. “What do you mean, why’s it got to be built?” he said. “It’s a bypass. You’ve got to build bypasses.” Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be."

"But the plans were on display . . ." "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them." "That's the display department." "With a torch." "Ah, well the lights had probably gone." "So had the stairs." "But look, you found the notice, didn't you?" "Yes," said Arthur, "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."

""Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?" "How much?" said Arthur. "None at all," said Mr. Prosser."

"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."

"Look, don't you understand?" shouted Arthur. He pointed at Prosser. "That man wants to knock my house down!" Ford glanced at him, puzzled. "Well he can do it while you're away can't he?" he asked. "But I don't want him to!" "Ah."

"[The Guide] says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick."

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep," said Arthur, "you should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you."

"This must be Thursday," said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer, "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value—you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble‐sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand‐to‐hand‐combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you—daft as a brush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough."

"More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might have accidentally "lost.". What the strag will think is that any man that can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

"Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)"

"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."

"People of Earth, your attention, please. This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system. And regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you."

"There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ... What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams."

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

"There was a terrible ghastly silence. There was a terrible ghastly noise. There was a terrible ghastly silence."

"It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the Presidency, a decision which had sent waves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy—Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President? Many had seen it as a clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas."

"The President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it."

"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, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical."

"If I asked you where the hell we were," said Arthur weakly, "would I regret it?" Ford stood up. "We're safe," he said. "Oh good," said Arthur. "We're in a small galley cabin," said Ford, "in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet." "Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of."

"Ford," insisted Arthur, "I don't know if this sounds like a silly question, but what am I doing here?" "Well you know that," said Ford. "I rescued you from the Earth." "And what's happened to the Earth?" "Ah. It's been demolished." "Has it," said Arthur levelly. "Yes. It just boiled away into space." "Look," said Arthur, "I'm a bit upset about that."

"Vogon Constructor Fleets. Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy—not actually evil, but bad-tempered, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, queried, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. "The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. "On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you."

"The Babel fish," said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. "Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. "The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.' "'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.' "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. "Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God. "Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

""If you're a researcher on this book thing and you were on Earth, you must have been gathering material on it." "Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes." "Let me see what it says in this edition, then. I've got to see it." ... "What? Harmless! Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One word! ... Well, for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit." "Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement." "And what does it say now?" asked Arthur. "Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed cough."

"(Ford) "you'd better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly like being drunk." (Arthur) "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" (Ford) "Ask a glass of water.""

"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."

"This is terrific," Arthur thought to himself, "Nelson's Column has gone, McDonald's have gone, all that's left is me and the words Mostly harmless. Any second now all that will be left is Mostly harmless. And yesterday the planet seemed to be going so well."

"“I don’t want to die now! 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!”"

""Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen..." and so on."

"The fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory there it is vitally important to get a receipt."

"Arthur looked up. "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," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."

"But that's not the point!" raged Ford "The point is that I am now a perfectly safe penguin, and my colleague here is rapidly running out of limbs!"

"[S]uch generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy. Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sorts of parties."

"It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart-ass."

"Five to one against and falling..." she said, "four to one against and falling...three to one...two...one...probability factor of one to one...we have normality, I repeat we have normality." She turned her microphone off—then turned it back on, with a slight smile and continued: "Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem."

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

"He reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words Please do not press this button again."

"All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done."

"Come on," he droned, "I've been ordered to take you down to the bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."

"Sorry, did I say something wrong?" said Marvin, dragging himself on regardless. "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God I'm so depressed. Here's another one of those self-satisfied doors. Life! Don't talk to me about life."

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

"One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid."

"Marvin trudged on down the corridor, still moaning. "...and then of course I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left hand side..." "No?" said Arthur grimly as he walked along beside him. "Really?" "Oh yes," said Marvin, "I mean I've asked for them to be replaced but no one ever listens." "I can imagine.""

"“Funny,” he intoned funereally, “how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.”"

"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?"

"He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea."

"Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet."

"And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence."

"Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now."

"Life," said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."

"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."

"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 thanks for all the fish."

"Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless."

""Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm."

"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." "But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything," howled Loonquawl. "Yes," said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly, "but what actually is it?" A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other. "Well, you know, it's just Everything ... Everything ..." offered Phouchg weakly. "Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means."

"The chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied ... Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway."

"I'd far rather be happy than right any day." "And are you?" "No, that's where it all falls down, of course." "Pity," said Arthur with sympathy. "It sounded like quite a good lifestyle otherwise."

"Come," said Slartibartfast, "you are to meet the mice."

"The aircar rocketed them at speeds in excess of R17 through the steel tunnels that lead out onto the appalling surface of the planet which was now in the grip of yet another drear morning twilight. Ghastly grey lights congealed on the land. R is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental wellbeing and not being more than say five minutes late. It is therefore clearly an almost infinitely variable figure according to circumstances, since the first two factors vary not only with speed taken as an absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor. Unless handled with tranquility this equation can result in considerable stress, ulcers and even death. R17 is not a fixed velocity, but it is clearly far too fast."

"What's up?" "I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there."

""Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it," said Marvin. "And what happened?" pressed Ford. "It committed suicide," said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold."

"It said: "The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. "For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?""

"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."

"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

""Share and Enjoy" is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years."

"The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig", and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration."

"Quite how Zaphod Beeblebrox arrived at the idea of holding a seance at this point is something he was never quite clear on. Obviously the subject of death was in the air, but more as something to be avoided than harped upon. Possibly the horror that Zaphod experienced at the prospect of being reunited with his deceased relatives led on to the thought that they might just feel the same way about him and, what's more, be able to do something about helping to postpone this reunion."

"Concentrate," hissed Zaphod, "on his name." "What is it?" asked Arthur. "Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth." "What?" "Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth. Concentrate!" "The Fourth?" "Yeah. Listen, I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox, my father was Zaphod Beeblebrox the Second, my grandfather Zaphod Beeblebrox the Third..." "What?" "There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Now concentrate!"

"By an equally suspicious freak of temporal relastatics, it is nearly always Saturday afternoon just before the beach bars close. No adequate explanation for this has been forthcoming from the dominant life forms on Ursa Minor Beta, who spend most of their time attempting to achieve spiritual enlightenment by running round swimming pools, and inviting Investigation Officials from the Galactic Geo-Temporal Control Board to "have a nice diurnal anomaly.""

"The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate."

"Well sir," snapped the fragile little creature, "if you could be a little cool about it..." "Look," said Zaphod. "I'm up to here with cool, okay? I'm so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I'm so hip I have trouble seeing over my pelvis. Now will you move before I blow it?"

"Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal."

"You are Zaphod Beeblebrox?" [the insect] squeeked. "Yeah," said Zaphod, "but don't shout it out or they'll all want one." "The Zaphod Beeblebrox?" ""No, just a Zaphod Beeblebrox; didn't you hear I come in six packs?"

"Mr. Beeblebrox, sir," said the insect in awed wonder, "you're so weird you should be in movies." "Yeah," said Zaphod patting the thing on a glittering pink wing, "and you, baby, should be in real life."

"I'm looking for someone." "Who?" hissed the insect. "Zaphod Beeblebrox," said Marvin, "he's over there." The insect shook with rage. It could hardly speak. "Then why did you ask me?" "I just wanted something to talk to," said Marvin. "What!" "Pathetic, isn't it?"

"So, how are you?" [Zaphod] said aloud. "Oh, fine," said Marvin, "if you happen to like being me, which personally I don't."

"Marvin," he said, "just get this elevator to go up, will you? We've got to get to Zarniwoop." "Why?" asked Marvin dolefully. "I don't know," said Zaphod, "but when I find him, he'd better have a very good reason for me wanting to see him."

"Well," the [elevator's] voice trickled on like honey on biscuits, "there's the basement, the microfiles, the heating system ...er..." It paused. "Nothing particularly exciting," it admitted, "but they are alternatives." "Holy Zarquon," muttered Zaphod, "did I ask for an existential elevator?" He beat his fists against the wall. "What's the matter with the thing?" he spat. "It doesn't want to go up," said Marvin simply. "I think it's afraid." "Afraid?" cried Zaphod. "Of what? Heights? An elevator that's afraid of heights?" "No," said the elevator miserably, "of the future...." "The future?" exclaimed Zaphod. "What does the wretched thing want, a pension plan?"

"Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and "maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the curious principle of "defocused temporal perception." In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators."

"The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. 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. And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. "Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day. And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex—just to show her. And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."

"[Zaphod] opened the door of the box and stepped in. Inside the box he waited. After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him."

"[Zaphod] had seen the whole universe stretching to infinity around him—everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he was the most important thing in it. Having a conceited ego is one thing. Being told by a computer is another."

"Delay?" [Zaphod] cried. "Have you seen the world outside this ship? It's a wasteland, a desert. Civilization's been and gone, man. There are no lemon-soaked paper napkins on the way from anywhere." "The statistical likelihood," continued the autopilot primly, "is that other civilizations will arise. There will one day be lemon-soaked paper napkins. Till then there will be a short delay. Please return to your seat."

"Most readers [of Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Transformations] 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."

"Have another drink," said Trillian. "Enjoy yourself." "Which?" said Arthur. "The two are mutually exclusive." "Poor Arthur, you're really not cut out for this life are you?" "You call this life?" "You're starting to sound like Marvin." "Marvin is the clearest thinker I know."

"I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?"

""Shee, you guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off." Zaphod"

"Maybe somebody here tipped off the Galactic Police," said Trillian. "Everyone saw you come in." "You mean they want to arrest me over the phone?" said Zaphod. "Could be. I'm a pretty dangerous dude when I'm cornered." "Yeah," said the voice from under the table, "you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel."

"But I'm quite used to being humiliated," droned Marvin, "I can even go and stick my head in a bucket of water if you like. Would you like me to go and stick my head in a bucket of water? I've got one ready. Wait a minute." "Er, hey, Marvin ..." interrupted Zaphod, but it was too late. Sad little clunks and gurgles came up the line. "What's he saying?" asked Trillian. "Nothing," said Zaphod, "he just phoned to wash his head at us."

"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 into a bit of a decline."

"The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago," continued Marvin. ..."And that was with a coffee machine."

"Amazing-looking ship though. Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow."

"Well, I wish you'd just tell me rather than try to engage my enthusiasm," said Marvin, "because I haven't got one."

""Er..." [Zarquon] said, "hello. Er, look, I'm sorry I'm a bit late. I've had the most ghastly time, all sorts of things cropping up at the last moment." He seemed nervous of the expectant awed hush. He cleared his throat. "Er, how are we for time?" he said, "have I just got a min—" And so the Universe ended."

"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."

"The ship was rocking and swaying sickeningly as Ford and Zaphod tried to wrest control from the autopilot. The engines howled and whined like tired children in a supermarket."

""You mean," said Arthur, "you mean you can see into my mind?" "Yes," said Marvin. Arthur stared in astonishment. "And ...?" Arthur. "It amazes me how you can manage to live in anything that small." "Ah," said Arthur, "abuse." "Yes," confirmed Marvin."

""I wonder who this ship belongs to anyway," said Arthur. "Me," said Zaphod. "No. Who it really belongs to." "Really me," insisted Zaphod, "look, property is theft, right? Therefore theft is property. Therefore this ship is mine, OK?" "Tell the ship that," said Arthur."

"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 way for a new hyperspace bypass—the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another—particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish."

"The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with.""

"The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarise: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarise the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem."

"How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?"

"Well, you're obviously being totally naive of course", said the girl, "When you've been in marketing as long as I have, you'll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them." The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford. "Stick it up your nose," he said. "Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know," insisted the girl, "Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?" "And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project." "Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there." "Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!" The marketing girl soured him with a look. "Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."

""If," ["the management consultant"] said tersely, "we could for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy..." "Fiscal policy!" whooped Ford Prefect. “Fiscal policy!" The management consultant gave him a look that only a lungfish could have copied. "Fiscal policy..." he repeated, "that is what I said." "How can you have money," demanded Ford, "if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn't grow on trees you know." "If you would allow me to continue.. ." Ford nodded dejectedly. "Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich." Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed. “But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship's peanut." Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down. "So in order to obviate this problem," he continued, "and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and...er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances." The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd."

"The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was."

"The alien ship was already thundering toward the upper reaches of the atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void that separates the very few things there are in the Universe from one another."

"Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was - indeed, is - one of the Universe's very small number of immortal beings. [...]"

"Africa was very interesting," said Ford, "I behaved very oddly there." ... "I took up being cruel to animals," he said airily. "But only," he added, "as a hobby." "Oh yes," said Arthur, warily. "Yes," Ford assured him. "I won't disturb you with the details because they would—" "What?" "Disturb you. But you may be interested to know that I am singlehandedly responsible for the evolved shape of the animal you came to know in later centuries as a giraffe."

"He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off."

"I have detected," he said, "disturbances in the wash." ... "The wash?" said Arthur. "The space-time wash," said Ford. ... Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat. "Are we talking about," he asked cautiously, "some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?" "Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum." "Ah," nodded Arthur, "is he? Is he?" He pushed his hands into the pocket of his dressing gown and looked knowledgeably into the distance. "What?" said Ford. "Er, who," said Arthur, "is Eddy, then, exactly, then?"

""There!" said Ford, shooting out his arm. "There, behind that sofa!" Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind. "Why," he said, "is there a sofa in that field?" "I told you!" shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. "Eddies in the space-time continuum!" "And this is his sofa, is it?" asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses."

"For a moment or two the old man didn't reply. He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head while his house is burning down."

"The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up..."

"The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexlusion, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive."

"the third non-absolute number is the number on the bill, (and how many people actually have the money to pay it)"

"My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre," Ford muttered to himself, "and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes."

"Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp."

"There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath. The moment passed as it regularly did on Sqornshellous Zeta, without incident."

"Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine, and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere."

""My capacity for happiness," he added, "you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first." —Marvin"

""You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number." "Er, five," said the mattress. "Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?" The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind."

""I would like to say that it is a very great pleasure, honour and privilege for me to open this bridge, but I can't because my lying circuits are all out of commission."—Marvin"

"Voon," [the mattress] wurfed at last, "and was it a magnificent occasion?" "Reasonably magnificent. The entire thousand-mile-long bridge spontaneously folded up its glittering spans and sank weeping into the mire, taking everybody with it."

"The renewed shock had nearly made him spill his drink. He drained it quickly before anything serious happened to it. He then had another quick one to follow the first one down and check that it was all right. "Freedom," he said aloud. Trillian came on to the bridge at that point and said several enthusiastic things on the subject of freedom. "I can't cope with it," Zaphod said darkly, and sent a third drink down to see why the second hadn't yet reported on the condition of the first. He looked uncertainly at both of her and preferred the one on the right. He poured a drink down his other throat with the plan that it would head the previous one off at the pass, join forces with it, and together they would get the second to pull itself together. Then all three would go off in search of the first, give it a good talking to and maybe a bit of a sing as well. He felt uncertain as to whether the fourth drink had understood all that, so he sent down a fifth to explain the plan more fully and a sixth for moral support."

"[The Guide] had some advice to offer on drunkenness. "Go to it," it said, "and good luck." It was cross-referenced to the entry concerning the size of the Universe and the ways of coping with that."

"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. ... Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties."

"Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful."

"[Zaphod] sat up sharply and started to pull clothes on. He decided that there must be someone in the Universe feeling more wretched, miserable and forsaken than himself, and he determined to set out and find him. Halfway to the bridge it occurred to him that it might be Marvin, and he returned to bed."

"On the way back they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms."

"Time travel is increasingly regarded as a menace. History is being polluted."

"There is, or was, a poet. His name was Lallafa, and he wrote what are widely regarded throughout the Galaxy as the finest poems in existence, the Songs of the Long Land."

"Lallafa had lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa."

"[Lallafa] wrote about a girl who had left him and precisely what he thought about that. Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and watered the lives of many people whose lives might otherwise have been darker and dryer. Then, shortly after the invention of time travel, some major correcting fluid manufacturers wondered whether his poems might have been better still if he had had access to say a few words to that effect. They traveled the time waves; they found him. They explained the situation -- with some difficulty -- to him, and did indeed persuade him. In fact they persuaded him to such effect that he became extremely rich at their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write with such precision never got around to leaving him, and in fact they moved out of the forest to a rather nice pad in town and he frequently commuted to the future to do talk shows, on which he sparkled wittily."

"[Lallafa] never got around to writing the poems, of course, which was a problem, but an easily solved one. The manufacturers of correcting fluid simply packed him off for a week somewhere with a copy of a later edition of his book and stacks of dried habra leaves to copy them out onto, making the odd deliberate mistake and correction on the way."

"Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what's changed?"

"They obstinately persisted in their absence."

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."

"Marvin droned, Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness don't engulf my head, I can see by infrared, How I hate the night. He paused to gather artistic and emotional strength to tackle the next verse. Now I lay me down to sleep, Try to count electric sheep, Sweet dream wishes you can keep, How I hate the night."

"That young girl," Marvin added unexpectedly, "is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting."

""Excuse me," [Arthur] said, "the Ashes. I've got them. They were stolen by those white robots a moment ago ... what should I do with them?" The policeman told him, but Arthur could only assume that he was speaking metaphorically."

"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."

"In Relativity, Matter tells Space how to curve, and Space tells Matter how to move. The Heart of Gold told space to get knotted, and parked itself neatly within the inner steel perimeter of the Argabuthon Chamber of Law."

"If a sunbeam had ever managed to slink this far into the justice complex of Argabuthon it would have turned around and slunk straight back out again."

"“I'm afraid,” he said at last, “that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about the same Universe.”"

""I wasn't very impressed with it when I first knew what it was," he said, "but now I think back to how impressed I was by the Prince's reason, and how soon afterward I couldn't recall it at all, I think it might be a lot more helpful. Would you like to know what it is? Would you?" They nodded dumbly. "I bet you would. If you're that interested I suggest you go and look for it. It is written in thirty-foot-high letters of fire on top of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the sun Zarss in Galactic Sector QQ7 ActiveJ Gamma. it is guarded by the Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob." There was a long silence following this announcement, which was finally broken by Arthur. "Sorry, it's where?" he said. "It is written," repeated Prak, "in thirty-foot-high letters of fire on top of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the..." "Sorry," said Arthur again, "which mountains?" "The Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet..." "Which land was that? I didn't quite catch it." "Sevorsbeupstry, on the planet..." "Sevorbe what?" "Oh, for heaven's sake," said Prak, and died testily."

"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. 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. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, and so the idea was lost, seemingly for ever. This is her story."

"Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbor's boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on."

"And as he drove on, the rain clouds dragged down the sky after him for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him and to water him."

"The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying "And another thing..." twenty minutes after admitting he's lost the argument."

"The moon was out in a watery way. It looked like a ball of paper from the back pocket of jeans that have just come out of the washing machine, which only time and ironing would tell if it was an old shopping list or a five pound note."

"They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience."

"Once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is."

"He paused and maneuvered his thoughts. It was like watching oil tankers doing three-point turns in the English Channel."

"He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe."

"Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this."

"The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this. The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem. This is: Change. Read it through again and you'll get it."

"Ford: "Life," he said, "is like a grapefruit." Creature: "Er, how so?" Ford: "Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.""

""This Arthur Dent," comes the cry from the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a mysterious deep space probe thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, "what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?" Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it."

"And as they drifted up, their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do."

"In a mute embrace, they drifted up till they were swimming among the misty wraiths of moisture that you can see feathering around the wings of an airplane but can never feel because you are sitting warm inside the stuffy airplane and looking through the little scratchy Plexiglas window while somebody else's son tries patiently to pour warm milk into your shirt."

"She was mostly immensely relieved to think that virtually everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong."

"The sign said: Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion. "It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.""

"I'm afraid I can't comment on the name Rain God at this present time, and we are calling him an example of a Spontaneous Para-Causal Meteorological Phenomenon." "Can you tell us what that means?" "I'm not altogether sure. Let's be straight here. If we find something we can't understand we like to call it something you can't understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let you go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don't and I'm afraid we couldn't have that."

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ... says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.""

"I come in peace," [the silver robot] said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."

"So much time," it groaned, "oh so much time. And pain as well, so much of that, and so much time to suffer it in too. One or the other on its own I could probably manage. It's the two together that really get me down."

"Ha!" snapped Marvin. "Ha!" he repeated. "What do you know of always? You say 'always' to me, who, because of the silly little errands your organic lifeforms keep on sending me through time on, am now thirty-seven times older than the Universe itself? Pick your words with a little more care," he coughed, "and tact."

""We apologize for the inconvenience." God's Final Message to His Creation, written in letters of fire on the side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains. "I think," Marvin murmured at last, from deep within his corroding rattling thorax, "I feel good about it." The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time ever."

"There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind."

"Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though."

"One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."

"The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79."

"But you like the way it's changed?" demanded Ford. "I like everything," moaned the robot. "Especially when you shout at me like that. Do it again, please." "Just tell me what's happened!" "Oh, thank you, thank you!"

"The current editor-in-chief, Stagyar-zil-Doggo, was a dangerously unbalanced man who took a homicidal view of contributing staff turning up in his office without pages of fresh, proofed copy, and had a battery of laser-guided guns linked to special scanning devices in the door frame to deter anybody who was merely bringing extremely good reasons why they hadn't written any. Thus was a high level of output maintained."

"[The Ident-I-Eeze] encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and it therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense."

""You stay there," said Ford, "and you'll soon be recaptured and have your conditional chip replaced. You want to stay happy, come now." The robot let out a long heartfelt sigh of impassioned tristesse and sank reluctantly away from the ceiling."

"When the Guide moved on, taking its building with it, it left a little like a thief in the night. Exactly like a thief in the night in fact. It usually left in the very early hours of the morning, and the following day there always turned out to be a very great deal of stuff missing. Whole cultures and economies would collapse in its wake, often within a week, leaving once-thriving planets desolate and shell-shocked but still somehow feeling they had been part of some great adventure."

"It was a programming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to high political office."

"The doors of the elevator slid open to reveal a large posse of security guards and robots poised waiting for it and brandishing filthy-looking weapons. They ordered him out. With a shrug he stepped forward. They all pushed rudely past him into the elevator, which took them down to continue their search for him on the lower levels. This was fun, thought Ford ... ."

"We all like to congregate... at boundary conditions. Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where time meets space. We like to be on one side, and look at the other."

"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 about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen."

"There's another prayer that goes with it that's very important. ...'Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen' And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from leaving out that last part."

"If any of them had chosen to look out of the window at that moment, they would have been startled by the sight of Ford Prefect dropping past them to his certain death and flipping the finger at them."

"Sub-editors. Bastards. What about all that copy of his they'd cut? Fifteen years of research he'd filed from one planet alone and they'd cut it to two words. "Mostly harmless." The finger to them as well."

"The thing they wouldn't be expecting him to do was to be there in the first place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, so he was winning already. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

"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 be impossible to get at or repair."

"The insurance business is completely screwy now. You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?" "Really?" said Arthur. "No, I didn't. For what offense?" Trillian frowned. "What do you mean, offense?" "I see."

"It wasn't merely that their left hand didn't always know what their right hand was doing, so to speak; quite often their right hand had a pretty hazy notion as well."

""Colin," he said, turning to the little, hovering ball. "I am going to abandon you to your fate." "I'm so happy," said Colin. "Make the most of it," said Ford. "Because what I want you to do is nursemaid that package out of the building. They'll probably incinerate you when they find you, and I won't be here to help. It will be very, very nasty for you, and that's just too bad. Got it?" "I gurgle with pleasure," said Colin."

"So everything was going well, was it? Everything was working out as if the most extraordinary luck was on his side? Well, he'd see about that. In a spirit of scientific inquiry he hurled himself out of the window again."

"It: No, the answer is an orange and two lemons."

"If you'd like to know, I can tell you that in your universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and there's all sort of stuff going on in dimensions thirteen to twenty-two that you really wouldn't want to know about. All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place. I can easily not say words like "damn" if it offends you."

"There's nothing there that wasn't there before. I'm just using light to draw your attention to certain drops at certain moments. Now what do you see?"

"So what's the point of showing me something I can't see?" "So that you understand that just because you see something, it doesn't mean to say it's there. And if you don't see something, it doesn't mean to say it's not there. It's only what your senses bring to your attention."

"Your universe is vast to you. Vast in time, vast in space. That's because of the filters through which you perceive it. But I was built with no filters at all, which means I perceive the Mish Mash which contains all possible universes but which has, itself, no size at all. For me, anything is possible. I am omniscient and omnipotent, extremely vain and, what is more, I come in a handy self-carrying package. You have to work out how much of the above is true."

"Reverse engineering enables us to shortcut all the business of waiting for one of those horribly few spaceships that passes through your galactic sector every year or so to make up its mind about whether or not it feels like giving you a lift. You want a lift, a ship arrives and gives you one. The pilot may think he has any one of a million reasons why he has decided to stop and pick you up. The real reason is that I have determined that he will." "This is you being extremely vain, isn't it, little bird?"

"It would be hard to say which he was more frightened of: that he might have hurt the person he had inadvertently sat on or that the person he had inadvertently sat on would hurt him back."

"Why are we surrounded by squirrels, and what do they want?" "I've been pestered by squirrels all night," said Arthur. "They keep on trying to give me magazines and stuff."

"I think it may be something unimaginably dangerous." "And you sent it to me?" protested Arthur. "Safest place I could think of. I thought I could rely on you to be absolutely boring and not open it."

"What did she say?" "She hit me on the head with the rock again." "I think I can confirm that that was my daughter." "Sweet kid." "You have to get to know her," said Arthur. "She eases up, does she?" "No," said Arthur, "but you get a better sense of when to duck."

"This is very, very serious indeed. The Guide has been taken over. It's been bought out." Arthur leapt up. "Oh, very serious," he shouted. "Please fill me in straight away on some corporate publishing politics! I can't tell you how much it's been on my mind of late!" "You don't understand! There's a whole new Guide!" "Oh!" shouted Arthur again. "Oh! Oh! Oh! I'm incoherent with excitement! I can hardly wait for it to come out to find out which are the most exciting spaceports to get bored hanging about in in some globular cluster I've never heard of. Please, can we rush to a store that's got it right this very instant?" Ford narrowed his eyes. "This is what you call sarcasm, isn't it?" "Do you know," bellowed Arthur, "I think it is? I really think it might just be a crazy little thing called sarcasm seeping in at the edges of my manner of speech! Ford, I have had a fucking bad night! Will you please try and take that into account while you consider what fascinating bits of badger-sputumly inconsequential trivia to assail me with next?"

"Temporal reverse engineering." Arthur put his head in his hands and shook it gently from side to side. "Is there any humane way," he moaned, "in which I can prevent you from telling me what temporary reverse bloody-whatsiting is?"

"I leaped out of a high-rise office window." This cheered Arthur up. "Oh!" he said. "Why don't you do it again?" "I did." "Hmmm," said Arthur, disappointed. "Obviously no good came of it."

"What was the self-sacrifice?" "I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes." "Why was that self-sacrifice?" "Because they were mine!" said Ford, crossly. "I think we have different value systems." "Well, mine's better."

"It wasn't [the Captain's] job to worry about that, though. It was his job to do his job, which was to do his job. If that led to a certain narrowness of vision and circularity of thought, then it wasn't his job to worry about such things. Any such things that came his way were referred to others, who had, in turn, other people to refer such things to."

"Somewhere on a fetid, fog-bound mud bank on [Vogsphere] there stands, surrounded by the dirty, broken and empty carapaces of the last few jeweled scuttling crabs, a small stone monument which marks the place where, it is thought, the species Vogon Vogonblurtus first arose. On the monument there is carved an arrow which points away, into the fog, under which is inscribed in plain, simple letters the words "The buck stops there.""

"Where do I fit?"

"A tremendous feeling of peace came over him. He knew that at last, for once and for ever, it was now all, finally, over."

"At the center of an uncertain and possibly illusionary universe there would always be tea."

"Whenever the Universe fell apart, Ford Prefect was never far behind."

"I will thank you," said the Hitchhiker's Guide Mk II, "to mind your language. I am fully programmed to take offense."

""You, Mr. President, are the most philosophunculistic, moronic, steatopygic excuse for a politician that it has ever been my good fortune to not vote for, and if I thought for one second that this crappy Universe deserved any better, then I would pay, out of my own pocket you understand, to have you assassinated."—Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged"

""We can charge the Unnecessarily Painful Slow Death torpedoes on the trip. Hyperspace static will give them a little extra sting." Jeltz nodded approvingly. "You, Mown, are an utter bastard." "Thanks, Dad," he said."

"Anything can be real. Every imaginable thing is happening somewhere along the dimensional axis. These things happen a billion times over with exactly the same outcome and no one learns anything. Whatever a person can think, imagine, wish for, or believe has already come to pass. Dreams come true all the time, just not for the dreamers."

"It's not every day a Galactic President gets dumped out of an air lock by his own head."

"Gazing up at a god's crotch can do wonders for a person's lack of low self-esteem."

""I do not hate myself. In many ways, I am not altogether too bed." – Constant Mown"

""Don't give any money to the unicorns, it only encourages them."—Eric the Red"

""Don't worry. I've been in show business for years; I know how to handle bastards."—Zaphod Beeblebrox"

""Hello, ladies. You may not know me yet, but you're gonna miss me tomorrow."—Zaphod Beeblebrox"

"Arthur was stumped. How was he to feel if not put upon?"

"For a being of light, gazing even for a moment into the heart of dark space has an effect equivalent to a dozen near-death experiences. It's the Universe's way of telling you to get on with your life. Which is a good thing if the feeling budding in a person's heart is a good feeling."

"There is a theory which states that the universe is built on uncertainty and that a definitive statement/action creates a momentary energy vacuum into which flows a diametrically opposing statement/action. Famous vacuum-inducing statements include:"

"Think before you pluck. Irresponsible plucking costs lives."

""You go ahead and kill yourself, don't worry about me." – Trillian"

"There is no such thing as a happy ending. Every culture has a maxim that makes this point, while nowhere in the Universe is there a single gravestone that reads, He Loved Everything About His Life, Especially the Dying Bit at the End."

"Marvin: Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust or just fall apart where I'm standing?"

"Marvin: Life, don't talk to me about life."

"Arthur Dent: I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. As soon as I reach some kind of definite policy about what is my kind of music and my kind of restaurant and my kind of overdraft, people start blowing up my kind of planet and throwing me out of their kind of spaceships!"

"Zaphod: Can it Trillian, I'm trying to die with dignity. Marvin: I'm just trying to die."

"The other Shaltanac's joopleberry shrub is always a more mauvy shade of pinky-russet."

"Zaphod: The building's being bombed! Who in their right minds would want to bomb a publishing company?"

"Ford Prefect: You know, in these sorts of situations it's really good to have a guide to help you."

"Frogstar Robot: Out of my way little robot"

"Life, as many people have spotted, is, of course, terribly unfair. For instance, the first time the Heart of Gold ever crossed the galaxy the massive improbability field it generated caused two hundred and thirty-nine thousand lightly-fried eggs to materialise in a large, wobbly heap on the famine-struck land of Poghril in the Pansel system. The whole Poghril tribe had just died out from famine...except for one man who died of cholesterol poisoning some weeks later."

"The Book: Having been through the Total Perspective Vortex, Zaphod Beeblebrox now knows himself to be the most important being in the entire Universe...something he had hitherto only suspected. It is said that his birth was marked by earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes, firestorms, the explosion of three neighbouring stars, and, shortly afterwards, by the issuing of over six and three quarter million writs for damages from all of the major landowners in his galactic sector. However, the only person by whom this is said is Beeblebrox himself, and there are several possible theories to explain this..."

"The Book: Incredible though it may seem, it is in fact possible that the strange and terrible history of the planet Brontitall, where Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox are even now falling out of the sky on to curious and aggravating birds, admiring surprisingly large statues of unexpected people, i.e. Arthur Dent, exchanging hostile words with alien soldiers with inexplicable limps and generally having a fairly peculiar time of it, may yet admit of some form of explanation. Furthermore, it is possible that this explanation will have more than a little to do with the mysterious somethings or watchamacallits of which the bird people refuse to speak. On top of which it is also possible that Lintilla the archaeologist (who may possibly turn out to have an almost impossibly strange life story) may play a major part in the uncovering of this explanation. It is even possible that pigs will fly, or that everyone will live happily ever after. In an infinite Universe everything, even The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is possible."

"Will everything tie up neatly or will it be just like life: quite interesting in parts, but no substitute for the real thing? What is the real thing?"

"I ache, therefore I am."

"Man in Shack: I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say."

"Man in Shack: The lord knows I am not a cruel man."

"Was I amongst friends when the Haggunenon admiral evolved into a life pod and everybody aboard his flagship escaped leaving me aboard as it steered itself into the nearest star? Was I amongst friends when I was left to walk in circles on a swamp planet? Left to park cars outside a restaurant for millenia? Left for the Krikkit robots to use for batting practice? Friend? I don't think I ever came across one of those, sorry, can't help you there."

"Marvin: This is the car park, you ordered a babe wash for your ship. Due to staff shortages, I am your babe."

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

"What do you think I am, completely without any moral whatsits, what are they called, those moral things?"

"This time there would be no witnesses."

"And time began seriously to pass."

"It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever."

"The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."

"Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah."

"He instituted this, er, Chair of Chronology to see if there was any particular reason why one thing happened after another and if there was any way of stopping it. Since the answers to the three questions were, I knew immediately, yes, no, and maybe, I realised I could then take the rest of my career off."

"God knows I tried my best to learn the ways of this world, even had inklings we could be glorious; but after all that's happened, the inkles ain't easy anymore. I mean—what kind of fucken life is this?"

"This ink would survive Armageddon, I swear. Cockroaches, and this fucken fingerprint ink."

"'Can you name the two forces underlying all life in this world?'"

"Velcro spiders seize my spine. You know gray areas are invisible on video. You don't want to be here the day shit gets figured out in black and white. I ain't saying I'm to blame, don't get me wrong. I'm calm about that, see? Under my grief glows a serenity that comes from knowing the truth always wins in the end. Why do movies end happy? Because they imitate life. You know it, I know it. But my ole lady lacks that fucken knowledge, big-time."

"The sheriff puffs up like he just discovered fucken relativity."

"When the rubbing of her thighs has faded, I crane my nostrils for any vague comfort; a whiff of warm toast, a spearmint breath. But all I whiff, over the sweat and the barbecue sauce, is school—the kind of pulse bullyboys give off when they spot a quiet one, a wordsmith, in a corner. The scent of lumber being cut for a fucken cross."

"Mom's best friend is called Palmyra. Everybody calls her Pam. She's fatter than Mom, so Mom feels good around her. Mom's other friends are slimmer. They're not her best friends."

"So the door flies open. Pam wobbles in, bolt upright like she has books on her head. It's on account of her center of gravity. 'Vernie, you eatin ribs? What did you eat today?'"

"Next thing you know, I'm halfway out of the building in Palmyra's gravity-field. You just can't argue with this much modern woman, I tell you."

"Outside, a jungle of clouds has grown over the sun. They kindle the whiff of damp dog that always blows around here before a storm, burping lightning without a sound. Fate clouds. They mean get the fuck out of town, go visit Nana or something, until things quiet down, until the truth seeps out. Get rid of the drugs from home, then take a road trip."

"Deep fucken trouble keeps my euphoria at bay. Pam just molds into the car. Her soul's already knotted over the choice of side-order, you can tell. She'll end up getting coleslaw anyway, on account of Mom says it's healthy. It's vegetables, see. Me, I need something healthier today. Like the afternoon bus out of town."

"Reporters and camera people roam the streets in packs. I keep my head down, and scan the floor for fire ants. 'Far aints,' Pam calls them. Fuck knows what other fauna climbs aboard in the century it takes her to get in and out of the fucken car. Wild Fucken Kingdom, I swear."

"The picture of Jesus that hangs behind the sheriff's door was taken at the crime scene. From a different angle than I last saw him. It doesn't show all the other bodies around, all the warped, innocent faces. Not like the picture in my soul. Tuesday breaks through me like a fucken hemorrhage."

"Jesus Navarro was born with six fingers on each hand, and that wasn't the most different thing about him. It's what took him though, in the very, very end. He didn't expect to die Tuesday; they found him wearing silk panties. Now girls' underwear is a major focus of the investigation, go figure. His ole man says the cops planted them on him. Like, 'Lingerie Squad! Freeze!' I don't fucken think so."

"Jesus just drops his head. I sting for him sometimes, with his retreaded, second-hand Jordan New Jacks, and his goddam alternative lifestyle, if that's what you call this new fruity thing. His character used to fit him so clean, like a sports sock, back when we were kings of the universe, when the dirt on a sneaker mattered more than the sneaker itself. We razed the wilds outside town with his dad's gun, terrorized ole beer cans, watermelons, and trash. It's like we were men before we were boys, back before we were whatever the fuck we are now."

"Mom scurries across our porch with a tray of listless ole joy cakes. She's in Spooked Deer mode. She looked this way the last time I saw my daddy alive, although Spooked Deer can mean anything from her frog oven-mitt being misplaced, to actual Armageddon."

"Apart from having the thighs and ass of a cow, and minimum tits, Leona's an almost pretty blonde with a honeysuckle voice you know got its polish from rubbing on her last husband's wallet. That's the dead husband, not the first one, that got away. She never talks about the one that got away."

"Her ten-year-ole is called Brad. Little fucker broke my PlayStation, but he won't admit it. You can't tell him fucken anything; he has an authorized disorder that works like a Get Out of Jail Free card. Me, I only have a condition."

"Facts may seem black and white by the time they hit your TV screen, but professional teams sift through mountains of gray to get them there."

"The truth is a corrosive thing. It's like everybody who used to cuss the dead is now lining up to say what perfect angels of God they were. What I'm learning is the world laughs through its ass every day, then just lies double-time when shit goes down. It's like we're on a Pritikin diet of fucken lies. I mean—what kind of fucken life is this?"

"Fuck her. I kick a pile of laundry, and slam my bedroom door. What I'm seriously considering, in light of everybody's behavior, is just to evacuate through the laundry door; hop a bus to Nana's, and not even tell anybody. Just call up later or something. I mean, the whole world knows Jesus caused the fucken tragedy. But because he's dead, and they can't fucken kill him for it, they have to find a skate-goat. That's people for you. Me, I'd love to explain the sequence of events last Tuesday. But I'm in a bind, see. I have family honor to think of. And I have my ma to protect, now that I'm Man of the House and all. Anyway, whoever points a finger at me, just for being a guy's friend, has some deep remorse coming. Tears of fucken regret, when the truth comes marching in. And it always comes, you know it. Watch any fucken movie."

"Her head-scarf and shades supposedly make her invisible. The invisible twitching woman. Me, I wear the reddest T-shirt you ever saw, like a goddam six-year-old or something. I didn't want to wear it. She controls what you wear by keeping everything else damp in the laundry."

"See Hysteriaville here? Science says there must be ten squillion brain cells in this town, but if you so much as belch before your twenty-first birthday they can only form two thoughts between them: you're fucken pregnant, or you're on drugs. Fuck it, I'm outta here. Life's simple when I'm angry. I know just what to do, and I fucken do it. Underpants my fucken ass."

"I'll tell you a learning: knife-turners like my ole lady actually spend their waking hours connecting shit into a humongous web, just like spiders. It's true. They take every word in the fucken universe, and index it back to your knife. In the end it doesn't matter what words you say, you feel it on your blade. Like, 'Wow, see that car?' 'Well it's the same blue as that jacket you threw up on at the Christmas show, remember? What I learned is that parents succeed by managing the database of your dumbness and your slime, ready for combat. They'll cut you down in a split fucken second, make no mistake; much quicker than you'd use the artillery you dream about. And I say, in idle moments, once the shine rubs off their kid—they start doing it just for fucken kicks."

"Fate suddenly plays its regular card. Leona's Eldorado sashays past the pumpjack, full of musty, dry wombs and deep, bitter wants. Mom withers. The fucken timing of these ladies is astounding, I have to say, like they have scandal radar or something. They foam out of the car like suds from a sitcom washing machine, except for Brad, who stays in back. He's eating a booger, you can tell. Betty Pritchard gets out and starts to strut around the lawn like a fucken chicken."

"Then Brad Pritchard appears at my window; nose to the sky, finger pointed at his shoes."

"But the pessimist in me says, 'Kid, forget vacations, what yez need is a cake wid a fuckin bomb in it.' My pessimist has a New York accent, don't ask me why. I ignore it."

"He's dressed in white, like the Cuban Ambassador or something. A jury would convict on his fucken shoes alone, not that his shoes are my biggest problem. They're the least of my fucken problems, know why? Because if you take a bunch of flabby white folk, of the kind that organize bake-sales and such, and put them in a jury, then throw in some fast-talker from God-knows-where, chances are they won't buy a thing he says. They can tell he's slimy, but they're not allowed to officially do anything, on account of everybody has to pretend to get along these days. So they just don't buy what he says. It's a learning I made."

"It's almost possible to be brave in here, if you add up your Nikes, your Calvin Kleins, your youth, and your actual innocence. What shunts you over the edge is the smell. Court smells like your first-grade classroom; you automatically look around for finger-paintings. I don't know if it's on purpose, like to regress you and freak you out. Truth be told, there's probably an air-freshener for courtrooms and first-grade classrooms, just to keep you in line. 'Guilt-O-Sol' or something, so in school you feel like you're already in court, and when you wind up in court you feel like you're back in school. You're primed for finger-paintings, but what you get is a lady behind one of those sawn-off typewriters. Court, boy. Fuck."

"I learned that the authorized world doesn't recognize the knife. Your knife is invisible, that's what makes it so convenient to use. See how things work? It's what drives folk to the blackest crimes, and to sickness, I know it; the thing of everyone turning the knife just by saying hello, or something equally innocent-sounding. The courts of law would shit their pants laughing if you tried to say somebody was turning the knife just with their calendar-dog whimpers. But here's why they'd laugh: not because they couldn't see the knife, but because they knew nobody else would buy it. You could stand before twelve good people, all with some kind of psycho-knife stuck in them that loved-ones could twist on a whim, and they wouldn't admit it. They'd forget how things really are, and slip into TV-movie mode where everything has to be obvious. I guarantee it."

"They turn to stare daggers at me. The typist's daggers come wrapped in Kleenex, I guess so they don't get shit on them. I just stare at my Nikes. Things have gone beyond a fucken joke. You just know the justice system ain't set up for folk like me. It's set up for more obvious folk, like you see in movies. Nah, if the facts don't arrive today, if everybody doesn't apologize and send me home, I'll jump bail and run over the fucken border. Against All Odds. I'll vanish into the cool of tonight, see if I fucken don't, hum cross-country with the moths, with my innocent-headed learnings and my ole panty dreams."

"A bright-eyed lady with short gray hair and bifocal glasses glides behind the tallest desk. Judge Helen E Gurie says the sign. Her swivel chair rattles politely when she sits. The Chair of God."

"A high-voltage tremor cracks through me, of hope, excitement, and ass-naked fear. You think I'm going to stick around for the so-called justice system to get its shit together? Am I fuck. Buses leave Martirio every two hours for Austin or San Antonio. The automatic teller machine with fifty-two dollars in it, from Nana's lawnmowing fund, is a block from the Greyhound station. Which is five blocks from here."

"'I definitely saw changes in the boy,' says George Porkorney. You can see her cigarettes hidden behind the fruit-salad plant on the breakfast bar at home. 'His shoes got more aggressive, he insisted on one of those skinhead haircuts …'"

"Muzak plays near the cells tonight. It fucken lays me out and buries me alongside my friends. It goes: 'I beg your par-den, I never promised you a rose gar-den.' Hot weather always brings these fucked ole tunes, always in the background, in fucken mono. Fate. Like, notice how whenever something happens in your life, like you fall in love or something, a tune gets attached. Fate tunes. Watch out for that shit."

"In the end, I pass the time practicing faces for the psychiatrist. I don't know if it's better to act crazy, or regular, or what. If the shrinks on TV are anything to go by, it'll be fucken hard to find out, because they just repeat every damn thing you say. If you say, 'I'm devastated,' they go, "I hear you saying you're devastated." How do you deal with that? All I know is what I learned last week, that a healthy life should feel spongy, like a burrito. This Tuesday night, the first-week anniversary of the shootings, my life feels like a fucken corn chip."

"Her sniffling feels like she physically has her tongue in my ear, like an anteater or something. Makes me want to puke and bawl at the same time, go fucken figure. Here's why she's going for gold, let me tell you: it's because now I'm not only in jail, but I might be fucken crazy as well. What a bonanza for her if I'm fucken crazy as well. Then her problem would be that she already spent her best whimpery moves; like, she'd have to shred a tit or something, just to keep up with the Unfolding Tragedy of Her Fucken Life. Out of kindness, I absorb the maximum number of sniffles before speaking."

"'You had a bowel movement, outside school? At the time of the tragedy?'"

"A thought comes to me; it is that a breeze on the butt, in the presence of supermarket lighting, should only be felt by the dead. I'm a naked fucken animal. But even naked animals need bail. Especially naked animals need it."

"Mexico. Another coupon tacked onto the pile I'll redeem when I get some power in my fucken life. Look around this life and all you see is folks' coupons tacked everywhere, what they'll do if, what they'll do when. Warm anticipation for shit that ain't even going to happen."

"I sense a learning: that much dumber people than you end up in charge. Look at the way things are. I'm no fucken genius or anything, but these spazzos are in charge of my every twitch. What I'm starting to think is maybe only the dumb are safe in this world, the ones who roam with the herd, without thinking about every little thing. But see me? I have to think about every little fucken thing."

"Instead of true joy, I feel waves; the kind that make you look forward to the smell of laundry on a rainy Saturday, the type of drippy hormones that trick you into saying I Love You. Security they fucken call it. Watch out for that shit. Those waves erode your goddam bravery. I even get a wave of gratitude for the judge—go fucken figure. I mean, Judge Gurie's been good to me, but—expand on the bowel thing?—I don't fucken think so."

"My face caves in. This is how I'm being grown up, this is my fucken struggle for learnings and glory. A gumbo of lies, cellulite, and fucken 'Wuv'."

"We could turn your situation around three hundred and sixty degrees..."

"Eyes move to the screen like sinners to fucken church. 'A millionaire before he was ten,' says the reporter, 'Ricky is now well on the road to his second hundred million dollars.' The way he says 'doll-larrs' you'd think he'd dipped his fucken tongue in molasses, or something. Pussy or something. Ricky just sits there like a spare prick, in front of the Lamborghini he can't even drive. When they ask him if he feels great, he just shrugs and says, 'Doesn't everybody?'"

"I don't have an answer. I just blow some air through my cheeks and shuffle away, to fucken Mexico, via my room."

"I carefully pull down the window behind me, then run under the biggest willow, to the back fence. Who lives on the other side is a wealthy couple; at least their house is painted wealthy. It means they spend less time spying through their screen, not like Mrs Porter. Wealth makes you less nosey, in case you didn't know."

"It bums me to think how few things Taylor has actually said to my face; like, maybe twenty-nine words, in my whole fucken life. Eighteen of those were in the same sentence. A TV scientist wouldn't give great odds of a college girl running away in the heat of the moment with a fifteen-year-old slimeball like me, not after a relationship spanning twenty-nine words. But that's fucken TV scientists for you. Next thing they'll be telling you not to eat meat."

"I just want to fucken die, go back to jail, to the warmth of Barry and his crew of madcap funsters. Last night was a long night at home, real fucken long. To cap it off, Kurt started barking again. I swear the barking circuit that orbits town every night starts and ends with fucken Kurt. For such a nerdy dog, I don't see how he got to be president of the barking circuit. It ain't like he's a fucken rat-wheeler or anything."

"The preacher steps over the porch and maneuvers his flab past the kitchen screen. 'This glorious Saturday smells of joy cakes,' he booms. I swear the Lord giveth and just keeps fucken givething to Pastor Gibbons."

"Lally follows us onto the porch. As soon as we're out of Mom's sight, he grabs my ear and twists it hard. 'This is the way forward, little man—don't blow it.'"

"The Lozano boys are out hawking T-shirts on the corner of Liberty Drive. One design has 'I survived Martirio' splattered across it in red. Another has holes ripped through it, and says: 'I went to Martirio and all I got was this lousy exit wound.' Preacher Gibbons tuts, and shakes his head."

"'Vernon, are you all right?' That's my ole mom. I swell with involuntary warmth."

"'And here's the winning ticket,' says Gibbons. 'Green forty-seven!' A sluggish frenzy breaks through the tent. The kid stops, and drags a mangled pink ticket from his pocket. He squints at it, like it might turn fucken green."

"I stand insulated from my world by the buzzing tequila-ozone of what I just did. Lies scatter around me like ants."

"Nah, my slime's so thick, it ain't worth coming clean at all. Take good note; Fate actually makes it harder to admit slime, the farther in you get. What kind of system is that? If I was president of the Slime Committee, I'd make it easier to come clean about shit. If coming clean is what you're supposed to do, then it should be made more fucken accessible, I say. I guess the shiver that really comes over me is that I just handed everybody the final nail for my cross. All they needed, on top of everything, was a credible lie. You can just see my ole lady on TV when they break the news, don't tell me you can't. 'Well but I even stayed up to pack his sandwiches...'"

"She gets that fabulous edge that girls get to their voices, the edge that spells oncoming Tantrum From the Bowels of Hell, that says, 'I'll scratch the heavens down around you and suck the fucken air from your lungs and spit you to fucken hell and you know it.'"

"A learning grows in me like a tumor. It's about the way different needy people find the quickest route to get some attention in their miserable fucken lives. The fucken oozing nakedness, the despair of being such a vulnerable egg-sac of a critter, like, a so-called human being, just sickens me sometimes, especially right now. The Human Condition, Mom calls it. Watch out for that fucker."

"A learning: deep shit sweetens your plans like crazy."

"Fate always pays attention to what you think, then slams it up your fucken ass."

"There's the learning, O Partner: that you're cursed when you realize true things, because then you can't act with the full confidence of dumbness anymore."

"I hear Taylor's song through the 'Tss, tss, tss' of a guy's earphones, a couple of rows up. 'Better Man' is the tune, by Pearl Jam. I don't even know the words to the song, but you can bet I'll spend the next eighty years in hell making every line fit my situation. Even if it ends up being about fucken groundhogs in space or something."

"The official ushers me to a desk, and sits behind it, all straight-backed, like he's the president of South America or something, like the borderline is the crack of his fucken ass."

"An American family sweeps past me into the elevator, dressed like Tommy Hilfiger on a golfing convention; it's a mama with a tense ole man, and the traditional two kids—a good one and a bad one. Type of folk who get lighthearted over dinner-music, and start talking about their feelings, to show how liberated they are. Your fucken cutlery drawer on parade."

"You can only really be yourself when you have nothing left to lose, see? That's a learning I made. It may sound dumb, but it ain't easy when your dreams roll up. Take note, you can feel jerksville lurking in back. And as we know, just by thinking it, you suffer it worse. The learning: potential assholeness when a dream comes true is relative to the amount of time you spent working up the dream. A=DT^2. It means I could even fucken puke."

"Alright I stand accused of just about every murder in Texas between the time I left home and when they hauled my ass back. With my face all over the media, folks started seeing me everywhere, I guess. Recall, they call it. Watch out for that sucker. And I'm still accused of the tragedy. Everybody just forgot about Jesus. Everybody except me."

"She said Mom closed up the house one day, turned the oven on full, and sat by its open door. Apparently, it's still a Cry For Help, even though our oven's electric."

"School never teaches you about this mangled human slime, it slays me. You spend all your time learning the capital of Surinam while these retards carve their initials in your back."

"'And we're not just talking executions here—were talking the ultimate reality TV, where the public can monitor, via cable or internet, prisoners' whole lives on death row. They can live amongst them, so to speak, and make up their own minds about a convict's worthiness for punishment. Then each week, viewers across the globe can cast a vote to decide which prisoner is executed next. It's humanity in action—the next logical step toward true democracy.'"

"'Blind, dumb shit,' he spits, his breath like hot sandpaper in my ear. 'Where's this God you talk about? You think a caring intelligence would wipe out babies from hunger, watch decent folk scream and burn and bleed every second of the day and night? That ain't no God. Just fuckin people. You stuck with the rest of us in this snake-pit of human wants, wants frustrated and calcified into needs, achin and raw.'"

"One learning, though: my big flaw is fear. In a world where you're supposed to be a psycho, I just didn't yell loud enough to get ahead. I was too darn embarrassed to play God."

"As I digest things, the regular Sunday quiet falls over the Row. You hear some papers rustle. Then a con calls out, softly."

"I take off my shirt. My skin is mostly healed now, from my art project. Tattooed in big blue letters across my chest are the words 'Me ves y sufres'—'See me and suffer.'"

"A terminal learning comes to me: that for all the sirens, game-show buzzers, and drum-rolls of life, it is the nature of men to die quietly. I mean, what kind of life was that? – a bunch of movies, and people talking about movies, and shows about people talking about movies. Still, I guess I asked for it. By being negative, destructive. I remember once calling my daddy to collect me from a place, but was sad when he came because I'd since grown to love the place. Death takes me like that."

"I watch Lally climb out of the car. Bless the motherfucker to hell. Bless his bones smashed and stuffed through the ligaments of his puking fucked eyes, bless his mouth to suck me off, take my bile so it kills him dead to a place where he stays conscious and fucken broken and cold, shivering fucken worms and slime from organs that pop and fucken waste as I laugh."

"Lally's face is a mask I fucken adore, suspended in time forever as slugs whistle and pierce the evening sky. He dances mid-air as chunks of his body pelt down like rain, before the bulk of him thuds twitching to the ground."

"Words cannot describe all the things that I have left to write."

"Dedication: As this book, including this dedication, was written in chronological order, I have, so far only myself to thank. This is assuming I will continue to be involved."

"I worked for the Federal Department of Transportation, painting the center lines on interstates. It was rewarding work, with the added benefit of being unchallenging. But following a heated dispute with my foreman over the meaning of the word sick day, I quit my job shortly after he fired me. But freedom has its price, which I soon found out was money. So, much like a butcher naturally becomes a surgeon, or a boxer becomes a cop, I decided to apply my knowledge of drawing long, white lines on asphalt to drawing much shorter ones with loops and curls on paper. In short, words. I became a writer!"

"My book would be written from the heart, probably my own. I would talk about how the death of Small-Town America brings great pain to me because I had always had an appreciation for these tiny villages. For who doesn't feel a fondness for a place where you know all your neighbors, and you can keep your doors unlocked, or you could enter your neighbors' home at night because you know his doors are unlocked?"

"What I learned made me angry. What I read made me sleepy."

"I had been on the road for what seemed like weeks but was probably closer to days, more specifically hours."

"Wigfield, said the sign. Wigfield's Hottest Ladies. I was intrigued. When was it incorporated? What was its population? And just how hot were these ladies?"

"I read the signs hanging in storefront windows hoping a tale of drama would emerge: Dam Being Torn Down Sale! declared the first. Everything Must Go Before the Dam is Torn Down and Town is Destroyed, trumpeted another. Preflood Sale, screamed a third. Then, like a golfer playing the back nine trying to finish before the heavy stuff comes down, I was struck by a lightning bolt. My God! That's it! That's my story... SMALL TOWNS ARE A BARGAIN HUNTER'S DREAM!"

"To compensate for their skittishness around one another, humans have developed an elaborate system of body language. Folded arms, for instance, may signal that the subject is closed off and wishes for the conversation to end, or that he is an Indian chief. Either way, avoid these people. A woman with her legs splayed wide may be saying "Welcome. How do you do?" or "I am adventurous and open to new ideas." Either way, seek these women out."

"Having never written a book before, I had no way to gauge the time it would take to complete a 50,000 word tome. And then the realisation hit me: I could be at this for days!"

"Eleanor: We were married by the justice the next week..."

"Udell: There's no need to make a major case out of it. Every small town has its shortcomings. Some small towns have a problem with the kids running off the the big city, other small towns might have worries about a drought affecting the crops, one of ours just happens to be a mindless killing machine who feeds on our fear."

"It's like we're family except we're not related, we didn't grow up together and we don't spend any time with each other. It makes you feel safe to know that if I needed a shovel or some lime, just down the road a bit is a neighbor I could take it from. Just because I don't know a lot of these people's names doesn't mean I won't ask them for things. That's the beauty of this town: neighbors who have things I want."

"Yes, I was in the service. Yes, I was stationed overseas. Yes, I was dishonorably discharged. And no, I don't want to talk about it. Here's what happened: I didn't know she was one of ours. I certainly didn't know she was an officer. And I meant no disrespect when I offered to treat us to her."

"I know how to drive, I mean, I got my operator's license, I just choose not to drive. I guess I'm afraid if I drive people might get hurt. And people would get hurt, that's pretty much been proven to my satisfaction. I'm not proud of it. I'll say that to anybody. I'm the first to admit that I should be nowhere near a powered vehicle. But my operator's licence says different, so occasionally all hell breaks loose."

"What will happen to me? I mean, if they flood the town and I'm forced to leave, how am I supposed to move my mobile home?"

"People can't help what they don't know. "I can't help the starving people of India, because I don't know what they need."

"I have a simple philosophy: KOKO! Which stands for Keep On Keepin' On. You know? Keep on living, even if it kills you."

"If you get burned by your stove, don't keep touching it, get rid of it!"

"I keep a diary. I been keepin' a diary since I was fourteen years old. Writing in a diary is like a muscle, you have to do it every day or you could easily pull it. Even if I don't have anything to say, I write: "Dear diary, I don't have anything to say today, maybe tomorrow." Sometimes I get tired of writing the same thing, so instead I might write, "Dear diary, nothing coming today, I'll see you tomorrow.""

"I begin to search my dresser for clothes until I realize I left them hanging on my body."

"Think about it: I haven't."

"Yes, I occasionally start fires when I'm out at a social event, but so what? Who doesn't? It's a free country. I have complete control over my desire to unleash the flickering golden god."

"It turns out it's pretty hard to exercise your right to vote when you're on fire."

"Top of my list is to find out who's killing all these people. I have already narrowed down the list of Mr. or Mrs. Murderer or Murderers. The second thing we need to do is establish a profile of the perp. Now, my investigation has show that the victims were killed by a blunt trauma to the back of the head or stabbing or shooting or poisoning or burning or... did I say shooting? This is often followed by dismemberment. Or preceded. It's really hard to tell after a while. But clearly this is a person who is a local and familiar to everyone or a stranger just passing through whose movements remain a mystery."

"I like being a lawyer. It makes me proud. I have a briefcase. I keep my fudge in there."

"I came to this town to represent the lead dispersal plant. The government wanted to close it because they said it was retarding the employees. So they closed it. I got a court order that allowed me to stay at the plant so I could disprove firsthand the effects of the plant. I like watches; they're shiny."

"I'm the great American success story. One day you're livin' out of your car, the next day you're livin' out of your car, and you're the mayor of a town. I practically run this place, and I'm not even fully unpacked."

"Now, a lot of people ask me how I acquired so many abandoned cars in such a small community. Well, the answer is simple. It's none of their goddamn business. And I resent the implication that I am murdering people for their cars, if that is indeed what they are implying, which would make perfect sense because, let's face it, how am I getting all these cars? I just want this community to rest assured that there are probably plenty of ways to get around killing people for their cars."

"Surrounding all this was a high barbed-wire fence, inside of which stood a cadre of snarling canines. But following the old adage that a snarling dog never bites, I scaled the fence, dropped to the ground, and enjoyed a brief mauling. I quickly occupied the dog's snapping jaws with my limbs to buy some time until I could figure out what to do with all this pain."

"Sorry about the dogs. My dad says they only attack in the presence of people."

"And of course there're those stories about the Wigfield Maniac, how thre's a madman in town, but I don't believe it's real. I think somebody is killing folks just to scare people."

"Animals think they are so superior to us. They pretend to act so innocent, all furry and frolicsome, but when we're not looking, they mock us. As I cut away the skin from a deer's skull, I always think, "Who's laughing now?" Usually it's me."

"Most folks in the city don't understand nature. They live in their concrete buildings, on their concrete streets, fucking their concrete wives. They're not around trees and rocks that taunt them all the time. Well, maybe a place like this doesn't mean much to city folks, but it means something to us- even if the squirrels make sport of me behind my back."

"Most animals are just waiting for their chance to take a swipe at a human. It's in their nature. They're animals. That's why we call them that. They don't have souls. They don't have nothing to fear in the afterlife. They have nothing to lose!"

"A hummingbird would gladly peck your eyes out. It would amuse it. It would hover above your eye socket sucking out your eye juice like nectar and throw it back up to its waiting hungry children! I'm not making this stuff up, I'm imagining it."

"And another thing: Naturalistic poses. Frolicking in some moss. Holding a nut. What's the point of that? If you wanted this squirrel to hold a nut, then why did you lock yourself in mortal combat with it? That's why I like to capture the last moment before the animal gives up the ghost. You can almost feel the fear rising off it like a stink. I don't coddle my dead animals."

"One of the things I do [at the morgue] is to make sure all the bodies that come in are dead. Here's my test: I just do things to them that no living human would allow, and if they don't react, then I know they're dead. And if they do react, well, the severity of the test usually makes that moot."

"Two things became clear after speaking to Lenare Degroat: One, steer clear of Lenare Degroat."

"I've spent every one of my forty-eight years right here in Wigfield, except for the times I've been incarcerated or living elsewhere."

"It's a funny thing about Shell Knob state confineatentuary, when you look out into the yard, you see so many of the ladies from Wigfield, you would swear you were at one of the town picnics! I suppose the only difference is, in Wigfield, we don't have armed guards on top of our electrified fences..."

"We have a strong sense of tradition here in Wigfield. We're one of the only towns that still celebrates V-J Day. For you young 'uns, that stands for victory over the Japanese! It's a joyous celebration. It's a time when the town comes together and remembers how many gave away their lives to nobly advance the cause of liberty, but mostly it's a good way to get together to remember how much we hate the Japanese. We hate Koreans, too!"

"More than ever the theater is the lifeblood of a community, but it's more than that. It's all the fluids, blood, semen, urine, and saliva. If I don't leave that combination of liquids onstage after a performance, then I know I have dropped the ball and let my audience down."

"[Rabbits] are industrious, they are dedicated, and they are delicious!"

"My brain had shut down and the only way to revitalize it was to get some serious R&R, and by R&R I meant, of course, T&A."

"When I first heard about the dam being torn down I was on a three-day X freak-out, so I was mostly just amused. Three days later I was pretty tired and after that I was unconscious, but now I'm just taking it one day at a time, you know, just trying to figure out what I was saying. What was the question?"

"You don't own me motherfucker."

"I could easily describe Wigfield in three words, but I don't know what they would be."

"As I held The History of Wigfield in my hands, fiddling with its well-worn cover, I anticipated the wealth of information it must contain. I excitedly cracked open the cover and the words seemed to leap right off the page and land directly in my book in identical sequence!"

"If there's one thing I've learned, it's you can't un-fry things."

"As I'm sure you can tell by my body adornment, I am an Artist of Doom. Cast your gaze into my bicep if you dare, there you will find a tattoo of chaos and destruction. Go ahead, if you wish to stare into the lair of oblivion. But beware: Once ensnared, there is no escape from my upper arm."

"I searched frantically for someone, anyone who could translate it for me, but everywhere I looked were just mirrors in which my own hideous laughing face was reflected. I cried, "How will I ever finish this book?" And then I knew the terrifying answer. I would have to write it."

"My plan was simple. Stay calm and stay in control of what was becoming an increasingly dangerous situation. In order to implement my plan, I launched into phase one: begging for my life."

"Most people think witches are a coven of lesbians dancing naked in the forest celebrating the semen stolen from imprisoned hypnotized males, which they then use to inseminate one another using turkey basters in order to create a legion of demon babies. Well, that's only part of it. We are also active in community outreach programs."

"Sometimes this place is like Old Salem, hunting for witches because of ignorance. If only they'd reach out and try to understand what we're about, we wouldn't feel compelled to place curses on them."

"The philosophies behind witch and a wiccan are totally different. A wiccan wears ceremonial black robes and invites her body to be inhabited by an evil spirit that commands her to perform tasks of mayhem and destruction. A witch, on the other hand, can wear anything she wants."

"I remember not far back, I got some dogs to take care of and some chickens to take care of and the dogs killed my chickens, so I got rid of the dogs and got some more chickens, and wouldn't you know it? I killed the chickens. I guess I judged those dogs pretty harshly."

"And Wigfield is small. It's so small that we have to go to the post office for a haircut, and they always lose it."

"I love Wigfield. It reminds me of the quaint little town in Pakistan called Gujurat, where I spent much of my early career. Like Wigfield, they understood the value of human life. So very few people are willing to put a price on it."

"But my policy is never to turn a customer away. Some doctors might tell their client, "What you're asking me to do might be dangerous to your health," or "If this leaks inside your breast it's going to cause major problems," but I don't say those things. I'm not here to judge."

"I don't ask them questions and they don't ask me things like "What college did you go to?" ir "Why don't you display your license on the side of the van?" or "Are these tools clean?""

"Me: What are your plans after the book is published?"

"Me: That's it! This interview is definitely over! I'm not going to be ambushed by somebody who I happen to know has a few skeletons of his own in his closet, and they are wearing some pretty dirty laundry."

"I guess I've got my pet theories about who [the Wigfield Maniac is], but in each one, the finger always points back to me, so I tend to keep them to myself. Maybe I committed the murders so I'd have something to write about. See what I mean?"

"The fact is, I'm just a small-town businessmayor, what can I do?"

"I'm sure you are who you say you are and that you will represent me in a way befitting the tragic consequences if you don't."

"Our heels are dug in, and we are not going anywhere until the state can explain to us financially why we should leave, which we won't, ever! We would just like to hear their offer."

"Me: Question number one: Do you enjoy destroying lives?"

"Me: Well, Mr. Farber, as you know, I'm writing a book about this situation. I am merely an objective third party trying to record the facts as they happen, but I would like to state, for the record, that I hope you are served such a crushing defeat by the judge that your wife is embarrassed to be seen in public with you, and your children are taunted and then chased from school by kids screaming "Your daddy is a failure!" Thank you for your time, and best of luck."

"Mr. Gein: I'd bet you two would burn like a gin-soaked hobo."

"I'm an outcast. Nobody will talk to me. It's just like The Scarlet Letter, the only difference being that my isolation is due to narrow-minded people refusing to think as individuals condemning an innocent without having accurate information. In The Scarlet Letter, the woman is shunned because she is a harlot. She deserved what she got. I think she came onto a priest or something."

"For my money, it was hard to be excited about libraries until they started checking out movies. I can't wait until the switch-over is complete. What better way to show the obsoleteness of a book than by setting it next to a DVD? I'm glad libraries are leading the charge against books."

"People are refusing my requests for interviews and lodging. Last night, at what I considered to be a diner, the homeowner refused to serve me. The once affable strippers used to seem pleased when I tucked a little something inside their G-strings, now they insist that something be money. This isn't about me. I'm just worried about the town and what it's not doing for me."

"I love to party, that's not a crime, although I have done some time as a result, but that's not a crime either."

"God, animals are stupid. They will do anything I force them to."

"The reason America's small towns are disappearing is this... 50,000! I've hit 50,000! If you'll forgive me for a moment, I just need to catch my breath. Okay, I'm gathering myself. I decided to go back and do a word count, and I've passed 50,000! Take that, Hyperion! I bet you thought I'd never finish! Now pay up!"

"I would like to dedicate this book to all the good people in charge of nominating books for the Pulitzer Prize. Now, I don't know exactly who you people are, but I do know that whoever hands out those Pulitzer Prizes is on the stick. They are a sharp crowd who I would wager are also very attractive. So once again, kudos to the whole Pulitzer crew. They do a great job, and by saying this I mean to take none of the glory away from the wonderful men and women working at the National Book Award. Thank you."

"To me, Wigfield is a deeply funny, refreshingly original book, but to be fair, it is the first book I've ever read."