"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!"

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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:"

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

""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."

""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"

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

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

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

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

"Where do I fit?"

"[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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

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

"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?"

"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."

"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?"

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

"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?"

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

"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.""

"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!"

"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."

"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."

""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 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."

"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."

"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?""

""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."

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

"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."

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

"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."