How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? (5.18)
But just because Vogons are dumb, doesn't mean humans are off the hook. (We're not smart enough to figure a way off this hook.) Though Adams gives this observation to the alien Ford, this is the kind of thing that we all probably have some experience with. But notice that Adams uses the pattern of three things here: he says one normal, then another normal thing, but then finishes off with a strange thing. We might say "yes, yes" to the first two ("It's a nice day," "You're very tall"), but then we hit the third statement about falling down a well—and that should give us a moment to reconsider: maybe it is foolish to keep stating the obvious.
Quote #5
Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason why he had had such a wild and successful life that he never really understood the significance of anything he did. (11.9)
Then again, maybe a little foolishness is a good thing. Take, for example, Slartibartfast and his fjords: making Africa with fjords is foolish, but if it makes him happy, who are we to complain? Here, Trillian wonders if Zaphod's foolishness is what keeps him from defeat. Is that just for Zaphod or can we all benefit from being a little foolish?
Quote #6
One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. (12.25)
Zaphod may be the most foolish character in the book—especially compared to the whale, who is a model of wisdom—but there are lots of different types of foolishness—or types of seeming foolish. Here there are a couple types of foolishness that turn out to be useful for Zaphod: he can be tricky, lazy, or just plain foolish.