Quotes

" 'It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost -- swallowed up in the ocean -- unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward.' "

• • • • Part The Second; Nell's experiences at school; Page 321 upper middle of the page

" 'Nell,' the Constable continued,, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, 'the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people -- and this is true whether or not they are well-educated -- is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or ever contradictory situations -- in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward. / 'In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. Your life up to this point has given you all of the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences. ...' "

• • • • Part The Second; General description of life with the Constable; Page 283 middle of the page

" Nell should have been tongue-tied and paralyzed with astonishment, but she was not; for the first time in her life she understood why she'd been put on the earth and felt comfortable with her position. One moment, her life had been a meaningless abortion, and the next it all made glorious sense."

• • • • Part The Second; From the primer, Princess Nell's return to the Dark Castle; Page 478 bottom of the page

" '... I don't know how my face conveyed that information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish this incredible feat. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.' "

" '... Then I remembered my grandmother and realized, my God, the human mind can absorb and process an incredible amount of information -- if it comes in the right format. The right interface. If you put the right face on it. ...' "

"But his real reason for being in Flatland is that Hiro Protagonist, last of the freelance hackers, is hacking. And when hackers are hacking, they don't mess around with the superficial world of Metaverses and avatars. They descend below this surface layer and into the netherworld of code and tangled nam-shubs that supports it, where everything that you see in the Metaverse, no matter how lifelike and beautiful and three-dimensional, reduces to a simple text file: a series of letters on an electronic page. It is a throwback to the days when people programmed computers through primitive teletypes and IBM punch cards."

"And when I get that feeling in my stomach -- you know the feeling when all of a sudden you get a ball of energy, and it shoots down into your legs and up into your arms and tells you to get up and stand up and go to the refrigerator and get a cheese sandwich -- that's my cheese monster talking, and my cheese monster will never be satisfied by cheddar, only the cheese of accomplishment."

"Let me not be so vain to think that I'm the sole author of my victories and a victim of my defeats."

"Let me not think of my work only as a stepping stone to something else. And if it is, let me become fascinated with the shape of the stone."

" 'How can I tell,' said the man, 'that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?' "

• • • • Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Chapter 29 Page 282 near the bottom

"As Ford gazed at the spectacle of light before them excitement burned inside him, but only the excitement of seeing a strange new planet' it was enough for him to see it as it was. It faintly irritated him that Zaphod had to impose some ludicrous fantasy onto the scene to make it work for him. All this Magrathea nonsense seemed juvenile. 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?"

• • • • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Chapter 16 Page 80 near the bottom

"Anything that happens, happens. / Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. / Anything that, in happening, cause itself to happen again, happens again. / It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though."

• • • • Mostly Harmless; text before Chapter 1

" 'The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.' "

• • • • Mostly Harmless; Chapter 12 Page 720 middle of the page

" So, what would the engineers not be expecting someone sitting on the ledge outside the window to do? / He wracked his brains for a moment or so before he got it. / The thing they wouldn't be expecting him to do was to be there in the first place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was , so he was winning already. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of fools."

• • • • Mostly Harmless; Chapter 12 Pages 718 - 719

" 'No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.' He was silent for a moment. 'You are a very fast flier, aren't you?' / 'I ... I enjoy speed,' Jonathan said, taken aback but proud that the Elder had noticed. / 'You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.' " . . . " 'To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is,' he said, 'you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived...' "

• • • • Part 2 Page 64 and 80

" 'Oh, Fletch, you don't love that! You don't love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That's what I mean by love. It's fun when you get the knack of it.' "

• • • • Part 3 Page 123

" 'Why is it,' Jonathan puzzled, 'that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he'd just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?' "

• • • • Part 3 Page 122

"There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. / A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play."

• • • • Chapter 1 Page 3

"A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week."

• • • • General George Smith Patton

"The sun isn’t bright just because I say it is. It just is. It was bright before I even knew the word for bright. I didn’t decide what it is, I acknowledged what it is. You aren’t worth something just because I say you are. You just are. You were worth something before I even said anything. I didn’t decide that you are, I acknowledged that you are. This is what I mean when I say 'You are worth it.'"

• • • • just-a-skinny-boy

"I'm a kitchen sink/You don't know what that means/Because a kitchen sink to you/Is not a kitchen sink to me, okay, friend?/Are you searching for purpose?/Then write something, yeah it might be worthless/Then paint something then, it might be wordless/Pointless curses, nonsense verses/You'll see purpose start to surface/No one else is dealing with your demons/Meaning maybe defeating them/Could be the beginning of your meaning, friend"

• • • • Kitchen Sink by Twenty One Pilots