How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
New York has gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, had sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald's, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger. (6.30)
This is the realization that finally brings home to Arthur the fact that Earth has been destroyed: there's no more McDonald's. It's curious that what finally seems to break through to Arthur isn't his dead parents or his vaporized country, but these elements of culture, like Bogart movies and McDonald's. Those elements of culture might seem small, but they are things that he experiences daily.
Quote #5
Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azagoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode To A Small Lump of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. (7.1)
That "of course" in the first sentence gets us laughing: the narrator is saying something that is totally new to us, but he just passes it off as something we all agree on. Now, what's curious about Azagoth poetry is that even the Azagoths seem to find it dreadful. It's also funny to imagine something that people usually think of as subjective (we like this poetry; you like that poetry; different people like different poetry) as really objective: this poetry is absolutely the second worst, and even the poet's intestines agree.
Quote #6
The prisoners sat in Poetry Appreciation Chairs—strapped in. Vogons suffered no illusions as to the regard their works were generally held in. Their early attempts at composition had been part of bludgeoning insistence that they be accepted as a properly evolved and cultured race, but now the only thing that kept them going was sheer bloodymindedness. (7.4)
The Vogons used to compose poetry as to prove that they were a civilized culture, though even they recognize that other people don't like what they do. So how do they react? They build torture chairs to make people listen. What kind of culture is that?