The Restaurant at the End of the Universe Quotes

“Life is wasted on the living.”

“My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.”

“I’m so great even I get tongue-tied talking to myself.”

“The little waiter’s eyebrows wandered about his forehead in confusion.”

“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

“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.”

“Shee, you guys are so unhip it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off.”

“His first theory was that if human beings didn’t keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--“If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.”

“He didn’t know why he had become President of the Galaxy, except that it seemed a fun thing to be.”

“It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result--collapse, ruin and famine.”

“Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’ the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question ‘Where shall we have lunch?‘”

“POPULATION: None. 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.”

″‘In an infinite Universe anything can happen,’ said Ford. ‘Even survival. Strange but true.‘”

″‘If I ever meet myself,’ said Zaphod, ‘I’ll hit myself so hard I won’t know what’s hit me.’”

″‘But what about the End of the Universe? We’ll miss the big moment.’ ‘I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish,’ said Zaphod,‘nothing but a gnab gib.’ ‘A what?’ ‘Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let’s get zappy.‘”

″‘If you ever find you need help again, you know, if you’re in trouble, need a hand out of a tight corner...’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘Please don’t hesitate to get lost.’”

″‘Marvin,” he said, “just get this elevator go up will you? We’ve got to get to Zarniwoop.’ ‘Why?’ asked Marvin dolefully. ‘I don’t know,’ said Zaphod, ‘but when I find him, he’d better have a very good reason for me wanting to see him.‘”

″‘Trouble with a long journey like this,’ continued the Captain, ‘is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you’re going to say next.‘”

“I’ve never met all these people you speak of. And neither, I suspect, have you. They only exist in words we hear. It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their eyes and ears.”