She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.

The light was only just visible - except of course that there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

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.

I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe

My capacity for happiness," he added, "you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first