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

I'm so great even I get tongue-tied talking to myself.

It all sounds rather naive and sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is snarl and take drugs.

The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.

Nobody got murdered before lunch. But nobody. People weren't up to it. You needed a good lunch to get both the blood-sugar and blood-lust levels up.

A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.

Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others.

I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg Ron stole Meggy's heart away and I got Sidney's leg.

If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?

He has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.

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.

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

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.

That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herself that that was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final real ulimate it.

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.

So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed. The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths. Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

He felt like an old sponge steeped in paraffin and left in the sun to dry.

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.

Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.

He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and 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.