In Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the number 42 is the answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” calculated by the supercomputer Deep Thought after 7.5 million years. Unfortunately, the question itself is never revealed. It is a parody on the futility of asking such questions.
It is one of my all-time favourite books of comical farce and wisdom. And while it has many unforgettable lines, I compiled a small bunch of funny lines, 42 of them, reproduced below:
“This planet has—or rather 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 movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
“‘Did I do anything wrong today,’ he said, ‘or has the world always been like this and I’ve been too wrapped up in myself to notice?’”
“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?”
“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
“Here, for whatever reason, is the world. And here it stays. With me on it.”
“Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”
“The answer to the great question…of Life, the Universe and Everything…is…forty-two.”
“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.’”
“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
“All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.”
“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’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
“Perhaps I’m old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.”
“So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.”
“For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.”
“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.”
“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-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“Ask a glass of water!”“Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them.”
“The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. ”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for… I think it might be because if I knew I wouldn’t be able to look for them.”
“Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.”
“‘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!’”
“Very deep… You should send that in to the Reader’s Digest. They’ve got a page for people like you.”
“Listen, three eyes,” he said, “don’t you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”
“Exactly!” said Deep Thought. “So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.”
“My capacity for happiness,” he added, “you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first”
“I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.”
“Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
“There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.”
“He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head while his house is burning down.”
“We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway.”
“It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them 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 the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.”
“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d 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.”
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
“So long, and thanks for all the fish.”
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