Quotes: The Primary Phase
Prosser: But Mister Dent, the plans have been available in the planning office for the last nine months!
Arthur: Yes! I went round to find them yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to pull much attention to them have you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.
Prosser: The plans were on display.
Arthur: And how many members of the public are in the habit of casually dropping around the local planning office of an evening?
Prosser: Er - ah!
Arthur: It's not exactly a noted social venue is it? And even if you had popped in on the off chance that some raving bureaucrat wanted to knock your house down, the plans weren't immediately obvious to the eye were they?
Prosser: That depends where you were looking.
Arthur: I eventually had to go down to the cellar!
Prosser: That's the display department.
Arthur: With a torch!
Prosser: The lights, had... probably gone.
Arthur: So had the stairs!
Prosser: Well you found the notice didn't you?
Arthur: Yes. 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". Ever thought of going into advertising? (Fit the First)
Ford: Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
Arthur: Very deep. You should send that into the 'Reader's Digest'. They've got a page for people like you. (Fit the First)
Arthur: If I asked you where the hell we were, would I regret it?
Ford: We're safe.
Arthur: Oh good.
Ford: We're in a small galley cabin in one of the spaceships of the Vogon constructor fleet.
Arthur: Ah. This is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of. (Fit the First)
The Babel Fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting, telepathically, a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain. The practical upshot of which is, that if you stick one in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech you hear decodes the brainwave matrix. Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final 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," said Man, "the Babel Fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that!" and promptly vanished in a puff of logic. "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore he proves that black is white and gets 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 best-selling book 'Well, That About Wraps It Up For God'. Meanwhile, the poor Babel Fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. (Fit the First)
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-million miles is an utterly insignificant blue-green planet whose ape-descended lifeforms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem which was this: Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper... which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy... And so the problem remained. And lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable - even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they 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 day, 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 realised 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, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and so the idea was lost forever. (Fit the Second)
Arthur: 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 (Fit the Second)
Vogon Guard: Resistance is useless!
Ford: Oh, give it a rest! Do you really enjoy this sort of thing?
Vogon Guard: Resistance is... what d' ya mean?
Ford: I mean does it give you a full satisfying life? Stomping around, shouting, throwing people out of spaceships?
Vogon Guard: The hours are good.
Ford: They'd have to be.
Vogon Guard: But now that you've come to mention it, I suppose most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy. Er, er. Except some of the shouting I quite like. Resistance is use-
Ford: Yeah, sure, yes... You're good at that I can tell... but if it's mostly lousy, then why do you do it? What is it? The girls? The leather? The machismo?
Vogon Guard: I-I-I- I dunno...I-I-I... I think I, just sort of, do it really.
Ford: There Arthur, you think you've got problems.
Arthur: Yes, this guy's still half throttling me!
Ford: Yeah!, but try an' understand his problem.
Vogon Guard: Right, so, what's the alternative?
Ford: Well, stop doing it, of course.
Vogon Guard: Hmmm.... Hmm.... Er... well... doesn't sound that great to me.
Ford: Well, wait a minute, that's just the start! There's more to it than that, you see?
Vogon Guard: Er... no. I, I think that if it's all the same to you, I better just get you both shoved into this airlock and then go and get on with some other bits of shoutin' I've got to do.
Ford: I mean c'mon, I mean now look... Uhhhahhhhhhh.
Vogon Guard: Thanks for takin' an interest. Bye now. (Fit the Second)
Arthur: You know, 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!
Ford: Why, what did she tell you?
Arthur: I don't know I didn't listen! (Fit the Second)
Marvin: I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed. (Fit the Second)
Marvin: Life. Don't talk to me about life. (Fit the Second)
Marvin: "And then of course I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side."
Arthur: "Is that so?"
Marvin: "Oh yes. I mean I've asked for them to be replaced, but no one ever listens."
Arthur: "I can imagine" (Fit The Second)
Marvin: Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust or just fall apart where I'm standing? - (Fit The Second)
Slartibartfast: You must come with me, great things are afoot, you must come now or you will be late.
Arthur: Late? What for?
Slartibartfast: What is your name human?
Arthur: Dent. Arthur Dent.
Slartibartfast: Late, as in, the late Dentarthurdent. It's a sort of threat you see. Never been very good at them myself, but I'm told they can be terrible effective. (Fit the Third)
Deep Thought: "The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is..."
Philosophers:"Yes?..."
Deep Thought:"IS..."
Philosophers (slightly higher):"Yes?..."
Deep Thought: "IS..."
Philosophers (really high):"Yes?..."
Deep Thought: 42.
Philosopher 1:"We are gonna get lynched y'know that?"
(Fit the Fourth)
One of the major selling points of that wholly remarkable book, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - apart from its relative cheapness and the fact that has the words "Don't Panic" written in large, friendly letters on the cover - is its compendious and occasionally accurate, glossary. For instance, the statistics relating to the geo-social nature of the universe are all deftly set out between pages 576,324 and 576,326. The simplistic style is partly explained by the fact that its editors, having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it with a few foot notes in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly torturous Galactic Copyright Laws. It's interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backwards in time, through a temporal warp, and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws. Here is a sample in both Headings and footnotes:
The universe. Some information to help you live in it.
One: 'Area'. Infinite. As far as anyone can make out
Two: 'Imports'. None. It's impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things in from.
Three: 'Exports'. None. See 'Imports'.
Four: 'Rainfall'. None. Rain can not fall because in an infinite space there is no up for it to fall down from.
Five: 'Population'. None. It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, but that not everyone 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, if every planet in the universe has a population of zero, then the entire population of the universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
Six: 'Monetary Units'. None. In fact, there are three freely convertible currencies in the universe, but the Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu doesn't really count as money. It's exchange rate of six Ningis to one Pu is simple, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six-thousand, eight-hundred miles long each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Niginis are not negotiable currency because the Galactic Banks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this Basic premise it's very simple to prove that the Galactic Banks are also the products of a deranged imagination.
Seven. 'Sex'. None. Well - actually, there is an awful lot of this. Largely because of the total lack of money, trade, banks, rainfall, or anything else that might keep all the nonexistent people in the universe occupied. However, it's not worth embarking on a long discussion of it now, because it really is, terribly complicated. For further information See Chapters Seven, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Fourteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Nineteen, Twenty-One to Eighty-Four inclusive, and... most of the rest of the book. (Fit the Fifth)
The history of every major galactic civilization has passed through three distinct and recognisable phases: those of survival, inquiry, and sophistication. Otherwise known as the 'How', 'Why', and 'Where' phases. For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question: "How can we eat?" The second by the question: "Why do we eat?" And the third by the question: "Where should we have lunch?" The history of warfare is similarly subdivided though here the phases are retribution, anticipation, and diplomacy. Thus, retribution: "I'm going to kill you because you killed my brother." Anticipation: "I'm going to kill you because I killed your brother." And diplomacy: "I'm going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it." Meanwhile, the Earthman Arthur Dent, to whom all this can be of only academic interest, as his only brother was long ago nibbled to death by an okapi, is about to be plunged into a real intergalactic war. (Fit the Sixth.)
