Douglas Adams > Quotes

“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.”
― 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

“Ако съществува нещо по-важно от моето его, искам веднага да се залови и разстреля.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“En sí misma, la Bistromática es una nueva y revolucionaria forma de entender el comportamiento de los números. Así como Einstein observó que el tiempo no era absoluto sino que dependía del movimiento del espectador en el espacio, y que el espacio no era absoluto sino que dependía del movimiento del espectador en el tiempo, así se comprende ahora que los números no son absolutos, sino que dependen del movimiento del espectador en los restaurantes”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Rubbish, we don't want to be happy, we want to be famous!" (Lunkwill)”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“So the hours are pretty good then?” he resumed. The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths. “Yeah,” he said, “but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“So long and thanks for all the fish. In”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Ford and Arthur talking:


"This is very, very serious indeed. The Guide has been taken over. It's been bought out."
Arthur leapt up. "Oh, very serious," he shouted. "Please fill me in straight away on some corporate publishing politics! I can't tell you how much it's been on my mind of late!"
"You don't understand! There's a whole new Guide!"
"Oh!" shouted Arthur again. "Oh! Oh! Oh! I'm incoherent with excitement! I can hardly wait for it to come out to find out which are the most exciting spaceports to get bored hanging about in in some globular cluster I've never heard of. Please, can we rush to a store that's got it right this very instant?"
Ford narrowed his eyes. "This is what you call sarcasm, isn't it?"
"Do you know," bellowed Arthur, "I think it is? I really think it might just be a crazy little thing called sarcasm seeping in at the edges of my manner of speech! Ford, I have had a fucking bad night! Will you please try and take that into account while you consider what fascinating bits of badger-sputumly inconsequential trivia to assail me with next?"

...

"Temporal reverse engineering."
Arthur put his head in his hands and shook it gently from side to side.
"Is there any humane way," he moaned, "in which I can prevent you from telling me what temporary reverse bloody-whatsiting is?"

...

"I leaped out of a high-rise office window."
This cheered Arthur up. "Oh!" he said. "Why don't you do it again?"
"I did."
"Hmmm," said Arthur, disappointed. "Obviously no good came of it."

...

"What was the self-sacrifice?"
"I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes."
"Why was that self-sacrifice?"
"Because they were mine!" said Ford, crossly.
"I think we have different value systems."
"Well, mine's better.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Five to one against and falling …” she said, “four to one against and falling … three to one … two … one … probability factor of one to one … we have normality, I repeat we have normality.” She turned her microphone off—then turned it back on— with a slight smile and continued: “Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem. Please relax. You will be sent for soon.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“I certainly don’t like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the one we’ve invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they’ve invented in America, who supply their servants with toupees, television stations, and, most important, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“Marvin the Paranoid Android sat slumped, ignoring all and ignored by all, in a private and rather unpleasant world of his own.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The mere thought," growled Mr Prosser, "hadn't even begun to speculate," he continued, settling himself back, "about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The Book: Curiously the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, 'Oh no, not again.' Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly *why* the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant privet bush where it hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and didn’t stop till it was set upon and eaten by a fox which choked on one of its bones and died on the bank of a stream which subsequently washed it away. During the following weeks Ford Prefect swallowed his pride and struck up a relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on Golgafrincham, and he was terribly upset when she suddenly passed away as a result of drinking water from a pool that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox. The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the letter Q into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He was experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick. Or of looking at a lot of colored dots on a piece of paper which suddenly resolve themselves into the figure six and mean that your optician is going to charge you a lot of money for a new pair of glasses.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick. The Guide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterwards.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Come,” he said, sweeping through the door to where Miss Janice Pearce sat glaring at a pencil, “let us go. Let us leave this festering hellhole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“According to her watch it was shortly after three o’clock, and according to everything else it was night-time.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“You mean," said Arthur, "you mean you can see into my mind?"
"Yes," said Marvin.
Arthur stared in astonishment.
"And ...?" he said.
"It amazes me how you can manage to live in anything that small.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“You know,” said Arthur thoughtfully, “all this explains a lot of things. 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 out what 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 Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“the normal background-noise type of guilt that comes from just being alive this far into the twentieth century,”
― Douglas Adams

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“But don’t you understand that people live or die on your word?”

The ruler of the Universe waited for as long as he could. When he heard the faint sound of the ship’s engines starting he spoke to cover it.

“It’s nothing to do with me,” he said, “I am not involved with people. The Lord knows I am not a cruel man.”

“Ah!” barked Zarniwoop, “you say `The Lord’. You believe in something!”

“My cat,” said the man benignly, picking it up and stroking it, “I call him The Lord. I am kind to him.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I’ve never met all these people you speak of. And neither, I suspect, have you. They only exist in words we hear. It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their eyes and ears.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“They looked at each other for a moment.

The moment became a longer moment, and suddenly it was a very long moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was coming from.

For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone with a Swiss cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation. He felt on the sudden like a cramped and zoo-born animal who wakes up one morning to find the door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savanna stretching gray and pink to the distant rising sun, while all around new sounds are waking.

He wondered what the new sounds were as he gazed at her openly wondering face and her eyes that smiled with a shared surprise.

He hadn't realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones until it now said something it had never said to him before, which was "yes.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The Googleplex Star Thinker is a super-computer from the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity and has the ability to calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle during a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard.

The Deep Thought computer call it a pocket calculator in comparison to itself.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy