You owe the world your gifts. You just have to figure out how to use them and know that wherever they take you, we’ll always be here. So, come on home, Peter.
Cassanova doesn’t get born for 145 years. Don’t want to run into him. I owe him a chicken.
All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for.
When the day becomes the night/ Then the sky becomes the sea/ When the clock strikes heavy/ Then there’s no time for tea/ And in our darkest hour/ Before my final rhyme/ She will come back home to Wonderland/ And turn back the hands of time.
“I’m sure they are, too, Madam President. Unfortunately, we had a little, um, engine trouble on the way home. It took us several months to make repairs. We played a lot of cards.”
No wonder they’re such good card players.
Valentine’s Day? I mean the greeting cards, and the candy, even the tire ads.
You can’t trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.
How to succeed in business without really trying.
“Do you want this body?”
“Is this a trick question? I guess the flowers really worked, huh?”
“Take me now… sub-creature.”
“We never talk anymore.”
If this is foreplay, I’m a dead man.
Is that a “money back if you’re not completely alive” guarantee?
Unless this was the afterlife. But I doubted it was. I’m not much of a religious person, but most afterlives I’ve heard of were something more than a blank nothingness. If God or gods existed, and this was all they put together for eternal life, I wasn’t very impressed with their user experience.
“The Babel fish,” said The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence 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,’ 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 vanishes in a puff of logic.
"‘Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
"Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God.
“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
Welcome, humans! I am ready for you! Fish, plankton, sea greens and protein from the sea.
Admiral, there be whales here!
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
He’ll live now, thanks to you.
“[Keevan] hasn’t earned the unwavering loyalty you’re giving him.”
“He does not have to earn my loyalty, Captain. He has had it, since the day I was conceived. I am a Jem’Hadar. He is a Vorta. It is-- the order-- of things!”
“Do you really want to give up your life… for the order of things?”
“It is not my life to give up, Captain. And it never was.”
When that purpose includes scanning my mind to prove my loyalty it’s not only an invasion of my privacy, but my honor!