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Chapter 5, note p 41
[...] shame [...] is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy.
Chapter 11, p 70
‘[...] we have normality, I repeat we have normality.’ She turned her microphone off—then turned it back on, with a slight smile and continued: ‘Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.’
Chapter 32, p 172
‘Well, you're obviously being totally naive of course,’ said the girl, ‘When you've been in marketing as long as I have you'll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We've got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.’
‘And the wheel,’ said the Captain, ‘What about this wheel thingy? It sounds like a terribly interesting project.’
‘Ah,’ said the marketing girl, ‘Well, we're having a little difficulty there.’
‘Difficulty?’ exclaimed Ford? ‘Difficulty? what do you mean, difficulty? it's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!’
The marketing girl soured him with a look.
‘Alright, Mr Wiseguy,’ she said, ‘you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.’
Chapter 9, p 46
Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold, and slightly damp.
Chapter 11, p 69
He [...] frowned like a man trying to unbend a corkscrew by telekinesis.
35, p 145
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-five thousands, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that ‘it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.‘In other words — and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded — their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.’
Chapter 4, p 39
He peered at it closely to check that it was a real three-leaf clover and not just a regular four-leaf one that one of the leaves had fallen off.
Chapter 6, p 61
Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, or bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant—a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the week-end. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.