Quotes About Paradox

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.

something almost, but not quite entirely unlike tea

There was a terribly ghastly silence. There was a terribly ghastly noise. There was a terribly ghastly silence.

Sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away.

Prove it to me and I still won't believe it.

No private detective looks like a private detective. That's one of the first rules of private detection. But if no private detective looks like a private detective, how does a private detective know what it is he's supposed not to look like? Seems to me there's a problem there.

There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Now concentrate!

There is an art, it says, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe that 35 percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down.

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 which states that this has already happened.

One of the main problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well-adjusted family can't cope with.

the only thing that really gets hurt when you try and change time is yourself.

The Electric Monk's day was going tremendously well and he broke into an excited gallop. That is to say that, excitedly, he spurred his horse to a gallop and, unexcitedly, his horse broke into it.

This sentence is not true

We have a saying up here. 'Life is wasted on the living.

Povero me!' dice Dio. 'Non ci avevo pensato!' e sparisce immediatamente in una nuvoletta di logica. "'Oh, com'è stato facile!' dice l'Uomo, e, per fare il bis, passa a dimostrare che il nero è bianco, per poi finire ucciso sul primo attraversamento pedonale che successivamente incontra.

It folded back on itself like something that M. C. Escher, had he been given to hard nights on the town, which it is no part of this narrative's purpose to suggest was the case, though it is sometimes hard, looking at his pictures, particularly the one with all the awkward steps, not to wonder, might have dreamed up after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up.

Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you travelled. This will come to you as a profound personal shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister.

If I ever meet myself," said Zaphod, "I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me.

That isn't to say that if you get involved in a paradox a few things won't strike you as being very odd, but if you've got through life without that already happening to you, then I don't know which Universe you've been living in, but it isn't this one.

A bit like a preying mantis that doesn't prey—a non-preying mantis if you like.

Es gibt eine Theorie, die besagt, wenn jemals irgendwer genau herausfindet, wozu das Universum da ist und warum es da ist, dann verschwindet es und wird durch etwas noch Bizarreres und Unbegreiflicheres ersetzt. Es gibt eine andere Theorie nach der das schon passiert ist.

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,' says 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 thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.