Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.

I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

We're not obsessed by anything, you see," insisted Ford. "..." "And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win." "I care about lots of things," said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty. "Such as?" "Well," said the old man, "life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords." "Would you die for them?" "Fjords?" blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. "No." "Well then." "Wouldn't see the point, to be honest.

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

One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work - supposing you're trying to find out how a cat works--you take that cat apart to see how it works, what you've got in your hands is a non-working cat. The cat wasn't a sort of clunky mechanism that was susceptible to our available tools of analysis.

What is this? Some sort of galactic hyperhearse?