Non-Calendarian Quotation of the Day

2/1 � Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, sohuld not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless; but when they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take.
--Arthur C. Clarke's Rendevous with Rama

2/2 - *sung*
The next President to lead the way...
Why, it just might be yourself one day...
Then the press will distort everything you say-ay-ay...
So...jump in your plane and fly away.
--Animaniacs, �The Presidents�

2/3 - I once knew someone with a motorcycle. He'd always drive around and wear his helmet on his knee, to look "cool". Once, a police officer pulled him over and made him put the helmet on his head. Later that hour, he had an accident. And tore up his knee.
--My Mother

2/4 - "Hello, Michael? It's Susan. Susan Way. You told me to call you if I was free tonight and I told you I'd rather be dead in a ditch, remember? Well, it turns out I'm free, absolutely, utterly and completely free, and there isn't a good ditch anywhere for a few miles."
--Susan Way, Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

2/5 - Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
--Groucho Marx

2/6 - <Individually, human beings are all dolts.>
<While collectively...>
<Collectively, they're a collection of dolts.>
--The Hive Queen and Human, Orson Scott Card's Xenocide

2/7 - It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport."
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport being the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
--Douglas Adams' The Long, Dark Tea-time of the Soul

2/8 - "This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right?"
"I don't know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you're with me?"
"Yes," she said.
"That's influenza," said Miro. "Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours.
--Jane and Miro, Orson Scott Card's Children of the Mind

2/9 - "You are a driver," he said, "and I use the word in the loosest possible sense, i.e., meaning somebody who occupies the driving seat of what I will for the moment call...a car while it is preceding along the road, of stupendous, I would even say verging on the superhuman, lack of skill. Do you catch my drift?"
"No."
"I mean you do not drive well. Do you know you've been all over the road for the last seventeen miles?"
"Seventeen miles!" exclaimed Kate. "Have you been following me?"
"Only up to a point," said Dirk. "I've tried to stay on this side of the road."
--Dirk Gently and Kate Schecter, Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

2/10 - Quentin went to the writing desk, chose paper and a pen, and wrote.

Dear M,

I love you and miss you. Please assure me that you're well. Tell me the future is still a treasure box we may open together.

All my love,
Q
...
He folded the note in half, then carried it to the grande dame.
"Oh, Mr. Fears, you are so cruel."
"Am I?"
"You could have sealed it. Then I would have steamed it open and read your note. But handing it to me folded shows such trust that I would die before I violated it."
Quentin laughed and read it to her.
"Oh Mr. Fears, I will not deliver this note. Instead I will find treasure boxes of my own for us to open together. Why couldn't you have white hair and arthritis! Such a romantic!"
--Orson Scott Card's Treasure Box

2/11 - Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it.
--Henry Ford

2/12 - "The computers we had in 1977 were more like electronic abacuses."
"Oh, now, don't underestimate the abacus," said Reg. "In skilled hands it's a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have on hand, and never goes 'BING!' in the middle of an important piece of work.
--Richard and Reg, Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

2/13 - London was the place she liked living the most, apart, of course, from the pizza problem, which drove her crazy. Why would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand that it was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it arrived at your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it out of greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front of the TV? What was the fundamental flaw in the stupid, stuck-up, sluggardly English that they couldn't grasp this simple concept?
--Kate Schecter, a New Yorker, Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul
(The odd thing is, Douglas Adams is British.)

2/14 - "The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by the Babel fish.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-boggingly useful could have evolved purely on 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,' 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 to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing."
--Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2/15 - The problem most face in trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
--Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless

2/16 - "This is the moment in all the videos when the couple that were screaming at each other suddenly look into each other's eyes and embrace each other and laugh at their anger and then kiss each other."
"Yeah, well, that's the videos," said Val. "If you lay a hand on me I'll ram your testicles so far up inside your abdomen it'll take a heart surgeon to get them out."
--Miro and Young Val, Orson Scott Card's Children of the Mind

2/17 - "It makes no sense at all for her to have married a man she obviously despised, whose disease she certainly knew about, and then go ahead and bear children to the man she must have loved from the beginning."
"Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind," Jane intoned. "Pinocchio was such a dolt to try and become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head."
--Ender and Jane, Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead

2/18 - If my father was at all defective in the qualities expected of our men - strength, bravery and all that - it consisted only in his letting himself be bullied and brow-beaten by my Tene[mother].
--Mixtli, Gary Jenning's Aztec

2/19 - At first, I assumed that the smooth and glossy hairless of the Pur�mpecha represented either their singular notion of beauty or a passing affectation of fashion. But there may have been an obsessively sanitary reason for it. In my study of their language I discovered that Por� has at least eight different words for dandruff and about as many more for louse.
--Mixtli, Gary Jenning's Aztec

2/20 - Ford stood up. "We're safe," he said.
"Oh good," said Arthur.
"We're in a small galley cabin," said Ford, "in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet."
"Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of."
--Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2/21 - "Concentrate," hissed Zaphod, "on his name."
"What is it?" asked Arthur.
"Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth."
"The Fourth?"
"Yeah, listen, I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox, my father was Zaphod Beeblebrox the second, my grandfather Zaphod Beeblebrox the third..."
"What?"
"There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Now concentrate!"
--Zaphod Beeblebrox and Arthur Dent, Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe