Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

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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?

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Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly 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.

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These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.

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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.

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The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.

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"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."

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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.

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The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules

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If they don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

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The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.

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If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

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Any man who 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.

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

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How do you feel?" he asked him. "Like a military academy," said Arthur. "Bits of me keep on passing out.

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So this is it," said Arthur, "We are going to die." "Yes," said Ford, "except... no! Wait a minute!" He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur's line of vision. "What's this switch?" he cried. "What? Where?" cried Arthur, twisting round. "No, I was only fooling," said Ford, "we are going to die after all.

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The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

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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?

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When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard-driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidently change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your hood in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford Prefect off his.

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You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy's a fun place. You'll need to have this fish in your ear.

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Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?

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Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

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The difficulty with this conversation is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

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Was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomability into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

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

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

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