Douglas Adams > Quotes

“The Universe, as has been observed before, 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.
For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The nothingth of a second for which the hole existed reverberated backwards and forwards through time in a most improbable fashion. Somewhere in the deeply remote past it seriously traumatized a small random group of atoms drifting through the empty sterility of space and made them cling together in the most extraordinarily unlikely patterns. These patterns quickly learnt to copy themselves (this was part of what was so extraordinary about the patterns) and went on to cause massive trouble on every planet they drifted on to. That was how life began in the Universe.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Where do you get inspiration for your books?
I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I thought of an idea.”
― Douglas Adams

“That is really amazing.' he said. 'That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing I think I'd like to steal it.”
― Douglas Adams

“Arthur followed Ford’s finger, and saw where it was pointing. For a moment it still didn’t register, then his mind nearly blew up. “What? Harmless? Is that all it’s got to say? Harmless! One word!” Ford shrugged. “Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book’s microprocessors,” he said, “and no one knew much about the Earth, of course.” “Well, for God’s sake, I hope you managed to rectify that a bit.” “Oh yes, well, I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it’s still an improvement.” “And what does it say now?” asked Arthur. “Mostly harmless,”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and quite a lot of millions of light-years from end to end.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I've just had an unhappy love affair, so I don't see why anybody else should have a good time.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The simple truth is that interstellar distance will not fit the human imagination.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“But unless we determine to take action,' said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, 'then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care about that?' 'Not enough to want to get killed over it,' said Ford.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Freedom," he said out loud... "I can't cope with it"..”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything

“Arthur lay in startled stillness on the acceleration couch. He wasn't certain whether he had just got space-sickness or religion.”
― Douglas Adams, Life the Universe and Everything - The Folio Society Edition

“Gilks sighed. ‘You’re a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that,’ he said, ‘but you make the same
mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I'm convinced that Bach is the greatest genius who ever walked among us, and the Brandenburgs are what he wrote when he was happy.”
― Douglas Adams

“Marvin," he said, "just get this elevator go up will you? We've got to get to Zarniwoop."

"Why?" asked Marvin dolefully.

"I don't know," said Zaphod, "but when I find him, he'd better have a very good reason for me wanting to see him.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“It’s only half completed, I’m afraid – we haven’t even finished burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet,”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“I thought,” he said, “that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something.”

“If you like, yes,” said Ford.

“That’s what they told us in the army,” said the man, and his eyes began the long trek back down to his whisky.

“Will that help?” asked the barman.

“No,” said Ford and gave him a friendly smile.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“She stared at them with the worried frown of a drunk trying to work out why the door is dancing.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe that 35 percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Look,” said Arthur, “would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Like all Vogon ships, it looked as if it had been not so much designed, as congealed. The unpleasant yellow lumps and edifices which protruded from it at unsightly angles would have disfigured the looks of most ships, but in this case, that was sadly impossible. Uglier things have been spotted in the skies, but not by reliable witnesses.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to life again.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He was a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose, and it did at least keep him on the move.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Trying to predict the future is a mug’s game. But increasingly it’s a game we all have to play because the world is changing so fast and we need to have some sort of idea of what the future’s actually going to be like because we are going to have to live there, probably next week.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“The Great Zaganza said: "You are very fat and stupid and persistently wear a ridiculous hat which you should be ashamed of.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“It's not so much an afterlife' Said Arthur, 'more a sort of apres vie”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaire to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaire and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I'm not sure that that's an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there's a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don't find out you're in town. At least with the gorillas you know that there's no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“It was just that he was fun in such an exhausting way because, being in advertising, he always wanted you to know how much fun he was having and where he had got his jacket from.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“The President in particular is very much a figurehead—he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had—he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn’t be more wrong.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy