Your favorite Book Quote

[miata13B]

Well this might be in the wrong forum, but I have been doing a lot of reading in my time now. I just picked up the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and forgot how hillarious it is. I got an idea to start a thread with everyone's favorite book quote or sample from a chapter. This one is mine, After the Improbability Drive was activated over Magrathea was turned on a bowl of petunias appearred and a Sperm Whale. It went like this. . . .

"Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet.

And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more.

This is a complete record of its thoughts from the moment it began its life till the moment it ended it.

Ah ... ! What's happening? it thought.

Er, excuse me, who am I?

Hello?

Why am I here? What's my purpose in life?

What do I mean by who am I?

Calm down, get a grip now ... oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it? It's a sort of ... yawning, tingling sensation in my ... my ... well I suppose I'd better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let's call it my stomach.

Good. Ooooh, it's getting quite strong. And hey, what's about this whistling roaring sound going past what I'm suddenly going to call my head? Perhaps I can call that ... wind! Is that a good name? It'll do ... perhaps I can find a better name for it later when I've found out what it's for. It must be something very important because there certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of it. Hey! What's this thing? This ... let's call it a tail - yeah, tail. Hey! I can can really thrash it about pretty good can't I? Wow! Wow! That feels great! Doesn't seem to achieve very much but I'll probably find out what it's for later on. Now - have I built up any coherent picture of things yet?

No.

Never mind, hey, this is really exciting, so much to find out about, so much to look forward to, I'm quite dizzy with anticipation ...

Or is it the wind?

There really is a lot of that now isn't it?

And wow! Hey! What's this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ... ow ... ound ... round ... ground! That's it! That's a good name - ground!

I wonder if it will be friends with me?

And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now."

Enjoy

 

[Joey D]

The Hitchhikers Guide is an awesome book, has to be one of my favorites. My favorite quote from it is...

"Now it is such a bizarrely impossible coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," say Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't though of that" and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

That and this quote from a Dave Berry book, I think I was on the floor laughing when I read it...

Another example of a corporation doing something that appeared to be clinically insane was the decision by General Motors, which must have an enormous executive conference table, to manufacture the Pontiac Aztek, a car so ugly that it routinely causes following motorist to go blind. Now if your IQ is a positive number, you are going to look at this car and you are going to have some questions, such as ‘who exactly is the target market for this vehicle?’ Does research show there are a lot of potential car buyers out there saying ‘I want a squat little car with a really big ass?’…What are we going to call this vehicle? The Butt-Mobile? The hunch car of Norte Dame? But apparently no GM executives asked these questions. Instead they chose to spend millions and millions of corporate dollars and actually make this car, which they called the Aztek…A-Z-T-E-K which isn’t even spelled right, the correct spelling is A-S-S-T-E-K and that isn’t scientific furniture destroys brain cells, I don’t know what the hell is.

 

[miata13B]

The Babel fish and god was a great part in the 'Guide'. That was on the Vogon ship. Another great was right at the beginning -

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans. And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever. This is not her story.

 

[300SD]

"fast, slow, fast, fast, slow"

 

[Solid Lifters]

So sneaky; so dirty, so bloody fantastic.

"All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him."
- Sun Tzu, the Art of War

 

[miata13B]

If you train people properly, they won't be able to tell a drill from the real thing. If anything, the real thing will be easier.

Richard Marcinko

 

[wfooshee]

One of my favorites is from the Hitchhiker books, don't recall which one, describing the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, along the lines of "no expense was spared to give the appearance of no expense being spared." I love that line!

 

[Omnis]

There is a tide...

 

[miata13B]

Caesar good quote

Et tu, Brute

 

[Touring Mars]

Richard Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker" (1986)

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

 

[Joey D]

I love Richard Dawkins works, although his latest book "The God Delusion" was a bit on the preachy side.