Douglas Adams > Quotes

“R is a velocity of measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental well-being, and not being more than, say, five minutes late. It is therefore clearly as almost infinite variable figure according to circumstances, since the first two factors vary not only with speed as an absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor. Unless handled with tranquility, this equation can result in considerable stress, ulcers, and even death.”
― Douglas Adams

“I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it,” said Marvin. “And what happened?” pressed Ford. “It committed suicide,” said Marvin,”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The light was only just visible - except of course that there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship—he merely left his office late one morning, and has never returned since. Though well over a century has now passed, many members of the Guide staff still retain the romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a sandwich and will yet return to put in a solid afternoon's work.
Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr., have therefore been designated acting editors, and Lig's desk is still preserved the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign that says LIG LURY, JR., EDITOR, MISSING, PRESUMED FED.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“The Universe is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I commend you on your skepticism, but even the skeptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidæ on our hands.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard-driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidently change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your hood in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford Prefect off his.”
― Douglas Adams

“the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do."

The sign read:
"Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion."

"It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“If you ever find you need help again, you know, if you are in trouble, need a hand out of a tight corner, please, don't hesitate to get lost.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“You’re paid a lot and you’re not happy, so the first thing you do is buy stuff that you don’t want or need—for which you need more money.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“In the center lay the exploded carcass of a lonely sperm whale that hadn't lived long enough to be disappointed with its lot.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I have detected," he said, "disturbances in the wash."
...
Arthur asked him to repeat what he had just said because he hadn't quite understood his meaning. Ford repeated it.
"The wash?" said Arthur.
"The space time wash," said Ford.
Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat.
"Are we talking about," he asked cautiously, "some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?"
"Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum."
"Ah," nodded Arthur, "is he. Is he."
...
"What?" said Ford.
"Er, who," said Arthur, "is Eddy, then, exactly, then?"
Ford looked angrily at him.
"Will you listen?" he snapped.
"I have been listening," said Arthur, "but I'm not sure it's helped."
Ford grasped him by the lapels of his dressing gown and spoke to him as slowly and distinctly and patiently as if he were somebody from the telephone company accounts department.
"There seems..." he said, "to be some pools..." he said, "of instability," he said, "in the fabric..." he said.
Arthur looked foolishly at the cloth of his dressing gown where Ford was holding it. Ford swept on before Arthur could turn the foolish look into a foolish remark.
"...in the fabric of space-time," he said.
"Ah, that," said Arthur.
"Yes, that," confirmed Ford.
They stood there alone on a hill on prehistoric Earth and stared each other resolutely in the face.
"And it's done what?" said Arthur.
"It," said Ford, "has developed pools of instability."
"Has it," said Arthur, his eyes not wavering for a moment
"It has," said Ford, with the similar degree of ocular immobility.
"Good," said Arthur.
"See?" said Ford.
"No," said Arthur.
There was a quiet pause.
...
"Arthur," said Ford.
"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
"Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that."
They sat down and composed their thoughts.
Ford got out his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was making vague humming noises and a tiny light on it was flickering faintly.
"Flat battery?" said Arthur.
"No," said Ford, "there is a moving disturbance in the fabric of space-time, an eddy, a pool of instability, and it's somewhere in our vicinity."
...
"There!" said Ford, shooting out his arm; "there, behind that sofa!"
Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind.
"Why," he said, "is there a sofa in that field?"
"I told you!" shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. "Eddies in the space-time continuum!"
"And this is his sofa, is it?"

... 12 chapters pass ...
"All will become clear," said Slartibartfast.
"When?"
"In a minute. Listen. The time streams are now very polluted. There's a lot of muck floating about in them, flotsam and jetsam, and more and more of it is now being regurgitated into the physical world. Eddies in the space-time continuum, you see."
"So I hear," said Arthur.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn't actually been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoked a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes. I wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply be Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“You have a time machine and you use it for... watching television?"

"Well, I wouldn't use it at all if I could get the hang of the video recorder.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one – more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Mr Cjelli, nice to see you back, sir. Sorry you had a spot of bother, hope that's all behind you now."
"Indeed, Bill, it is. You find me thriving. And Mrs Roberts? How is she? Foot still troubling her?"
"Not since she had it off, thanks for asking, sir. Between you and me, sir, I would've been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them."
(...)
"...thank you, and my best to what remains of Mrs Roberts.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“...and the renewed shock had nearly made him spill his drink. He drained it quickly before anything serious happened to it. He then had another quick one to follow the first one down and check that it was all right.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“There were three of them, three police cars left askew across the road in a way that transcended mere parking. It sent out a massive signal to the world saying that the law was here now taking charge of things, and that anyone who just had normal, good and cheerful business to conduct in Lupton Road could just fuck off.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“A Hooloovoo is a super-intelligent shade of the color blue.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“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.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe