“He isn't what he's pretending to be with her. I watch him all the time. I'm going to be there when he stops pretending. I'm going to be her bulletproof vest, her shield, her fallen fucking angel, whether she wants one or not. He's pretending he's almost human. He's no more human than me.”

“He was serious. He didn’t want her to hold him close. He didn’t want to pretend she was his mother. He didn’t want to imagine going home in her car to pet her black labs. He didn’t want to dream about sitting down to a home-cooked spaghetti dinner at her kitchen table with her family. Those things would never be his. He watched her eyes switch from hazel to green.”

“Could she kiss him? Would he allow her that? Was that something he could pretend was nothing? What about making love? Could she just open up her legs and pull him inside her and have him all she wanted and later give her assent that it was nothing?”

“So. You're a fallen angel." She folded her arms."I'm not fallen," he said roughly."Then what are you?"He shrugged. "Busted.”

“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. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so—but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.”

“When they finally made love, he would accept no more than total surrender from her, just as he would surrender himself to her. There was nothing casual about what lay between them, and he wouldn't allow her to pretend otherwise.~Ethan”