Douglas Adams > Quotes

“It's the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make the stand out. They're all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I've taken, then maybe you won't finish up at the end of your life" --she paused, and filled her lungs for a good should--"in a smelly old cave like this!”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Prove it to me and I still won't believe it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“We live in strange times. 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. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity of infinite recursion and say things like, “Oh, hi, Ed! Nice tan. How’s Carol?” involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and tumble. So give your kid a break, okay?”
― Douglas Adams

“He would have felt safe if alongside the Dentrassis' underwear, the piles of Sqornshellous mattresses and the man from Betelgeuse holding up a small yellow fish and offering to put it in his ear he had been able to see just a small packet of cornflakes. But he couldn't, and he didn't feel safe.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a trillion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“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

“And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super-computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“If you describe yourself as "Atheist," some people will say, "Don't you mean 'Agnostic'?" I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god - in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It's easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it's an opinion I hold seriously. It's funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague wishy-washy Agnosticism - both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much.”
― Douglas Adams

“No private detective looks like a private detective. That's one of the first rules of private detection."
"But if no private detective looks like a private detective, how does a private detective know what it is he's supposed not to look like? Seems to me there's a problem there.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

``Make 'em dry,'' is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, ``make 'em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing 'em once a week.''

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They're not altogether clear what those sins are, and don't want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever their sins are they are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“From another direction he felt the sensation of being a sheep startled by a flying saucer, but it was virtually indistinguishable from the feeling of being a sheep startled by anything else it ever encountered, for they were creatures who learned very little on their journey through life, and would be startled to see the sun rising in the morning, and astonished by all the green stuff in the fields.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“The only thing nicer than a phone that didn't ring all the time (or indeed at all) was six phones that didn't ring all the time (or indeed at all).”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“He inched his way up the corridor as if he would rather be yarding his way down it, which was true.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Arthur lolled.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no difference. Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Now concentrate!”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that."
"Everyone?" said Arthur.
"Well, if everyone has that perhaps it means something!
Perhaps somewhere outside the Universe we know..."
"Maybe. Who cares?" said Slartibartfast before Arthur got too excited. "Perhaps I'm old and tired," he continued, "but I always think that the chances of finding what out really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The air was stifling, but he liked it because it was stifling city air, full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music, and the distant sound of warring police tribes.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn't him.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Totally mad,' he said, 'utter nonsense. But we'll do it because it's brilliant nonsense.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“There was one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Will you stop counting!' snarled Zaphod.
'Yes,' said Ford Prefect, 'in three minutes and thirty-five seconds.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Time,” said Arthur weakly, “is not currently one of my problems.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Our favourite item was the balcony that overlooked the sea because it had an awning that you lowered by pressing an electric switch. The switch had two settings. You could either turn it to AUTO, in which case the awning lowered itself whenever the sun came out, or you could set it to MANUEL [sic], in which case, we assumed, a small, incompetent Spanish waiter came and did it for you.”
― Douglas Adams

“Deep in the rain forest it was doing what it usually does in rain forests, which was raining: hence the name.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I've heard an idea proposed, I've no idea how seriously, to account for the sensation of vertigo. It's an idea that I instinctively like and it goes like this. The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of falling. It's often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear. However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey toward our current state, we lived in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. There are even those who speculate that we may have something birdlike in our ancestral line. In which case, there may be some part of our mind that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying "Jump!" and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, "For Christ's sake, don't!" In fact, vertigo is explained by some not as the fear of falling, but as the temptation to jump!”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See