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."

"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!"

"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."

"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.

"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.

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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 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!”

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.

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 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."

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.

In the Deep South of Canberra, the sun never appeared today - high fog/low cloud is still haunting the area and the sun has apparently now set. Now I understand how the inhabitants of the planet Cricket felt.

It got up to a staggeringly high of 5.6 degrees while feeling like about one degree. Thankfully, there was no wind, or it would have been even worse.

I wonder if we will see the sun tomorrow.

#CanberraWinter
#DouglasAdams
#HitchhikersGuide