We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".

Don't Panic.

"The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline."

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

Kate's spirits sank to the very bottom of her being and began to prowl around there making a low growling noise.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot.

Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.

A learning experience is one of those things that say, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that."

We don't have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it.

"My name is Kate Schechter. Two 'c's, two 'h's, two 'e's, and also a 't', an 'r', and an 's'. Provided they're all there the bank won't be fussy about the order they come in. They never seem to know themselves."

The usual people tried to claim responsibility. First the IRA , then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at all.

In fact, a very similar phrase was invented to account for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and concrete into an explosive condition, which was "nonlinear, catastrophic structural exasperation," or to put it another way--as a junior cabinet minister did on television the following night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his career--the check-in desk had just got "fundamentally fed up with being where it was."

You would probably not say that he was sleeping the sleep of the just, unless you meant the just asleep, but it was certainly the sleep of someone who was not fooling about when he climbed into bed of a night and turned off the light.

The explosion was now officially designated an "Act of God." But, thought Dirk, what god? And why? What god would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15:37 flight to Oslo?

Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

It was his subconscious which told him this that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.

There was constant talk about hewing things and ravaging things and splitting things asunder. Lots of big talk of things being mighty, and of things being riven, and of things being in thrall to other things, but very little attention given, as I now realise, to the laundry.

Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila.

It'd be like a bunch of rivers, the Amazon and the Mississippi and the Congo asking how the Atlantic Ocean might affect them… and the answer is, of course, that they won't be rivers anymore, just currents in the ocean.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.

In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much, the wheel, New York, wars and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.

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?

Reg, as he insisted on being called, had a memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly in that it was colorful, flitted prettily hither and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct.

The Encyclopedia Galactica, in its chapter on Love states that it is far too complicated to define. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of love: "Avoid, if at all possible."