Douglas Adams > Quotes

“elegant gazelle-like creatures with silken coats and dewy eyes which the Vogons would catch and sit on. They were no use as transport because their backs would snap instantly, but the Vogons sat on them anyway.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“When I was a kid,'' she said. ``These sort of stories always start like this, don't they, `When I was a kid ...' Anyway. This is the bit where the girl suddenly says, `When I was a kid' and starts to unburden herself. We have got to that bit. When I was a kid I had this picture hanging over the foot of my bed ... What do you think of it so far?''

``I like it. I think it's moving well. You're getting the bedroom interest in nice and early. We could probably do with some development with the picture.''

``It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like,'' she said, ``but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?''

``I know. I was plagued with them too. Rabbits in waistcoats.''

``Exactly. These rabbits were in fact on a raft, as were assorted rats and owls. There may even have been a reindeer.''

``On the raft.''

``On the raft. And a boy was sitting on the raft.''

``Among the rabbits in waistcoats and the owls and the reindeer.''

``Precisely there. A boy of the cheery gypsy ragamuffin variety.''

``Ugh.''

``The picture worried me, I must say. There was an otter swimming in front of the raft, and I used to lie awake at night worrying about this otter having to pull the raft, with all these wretched animals on it who shouldn't even be on a raft, and the otter had such a thin tail to pull it with I thought it must hurt pulling it all the time. Worried me. Not badly, but just vaguely, all the time.

``Then one day --- and remember I'd been looking at this picture every night for years --- I suddenly noticed that the raft had a sail. Never seen it before. The otter was fine, he was just swimming along.''

She shrugged.

``Good story?'' she said.

``Ends weakly,'' said Arthur, ``leaves the audience crying `Yes, but what of it?' Fine up till there, but needs a final sting before the credits.''

Fenchurch laughed and hugged her legs.

``It was just such a sudden revelation, years of almost unnoticed worry just dropping away, like taking off heavy weights, like black and white becoming colour, like a dry stick suddenly being watered. The sudden shift of perspective that says `Put away your worries, the world is a good and perfect place. It is in fact very easy.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“The Babel fish,’ said The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, ‘is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“It's just that in your case the consequences of not knowing any of this stuff are particularly terrible, but then, hey, that's just the way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“The hereditary Emperor is nearly dead and has been for many centuries. In the last moments of his dying coma he was locked in a stasis field which keeps him in a state of perpetual unchangingness. All his heirs are now long dead, and this means that without any drastic political upheaval, power has simply and effectively moved a rung or two down the ladder, and is now seen to be vested in a body that used to act simply as advisers to the Emperor—an elected governmental assembly headed by a President elected by that assembly. In fact it vests in no such place. 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 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“deciding that just as discretion was the better part of valor, so was cowardice the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“I have been listening,” said Arthur, “but I’m not sure it’s helped.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He continued to lie there, like someone lying awake at four o’clock in the morning, unable to put his mind to rest, but unable to find anything to do with it.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or — what’s that strange thing you British play?” “Er, cricket? Self-loathing?” “Parliamentary democracy.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“We’re going,’ he said excitedly, and shivered with energy. ‘Where? How?’ said Arthur. ‘I don’t know,’ said Ford, ‘but I just feel that the time is right. Things are going to happen. We’re on our way.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I have detected,’ he said, ‘disturbances in the wash.’ He”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything

“There was once a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.”
― Douglas Adams

“The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t. And”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Complete Trilogy in Five Parts

“teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really.” Ford leaned back on the mattress with his hands behind his head and looked infuriatingly pleased with himself.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The particular way in which he was choosing to dice recklessly with death today was by trying to pay for a drinks bill the size of a small defence budget with an American Express card, which was not acceptable anywhere in the known Universe.”
― Douglas Adams, The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five

“The Babel fish,” said The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, “is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. “Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a fina and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. “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.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He knew that one of the things he was supposed to do as a parent was to show trust in his child, to build a sense of trust and confidence into the bedrock of relationship between them. He had had a nasty feeling that that might be an idiotic thing to do, but he did it anyway, and sure enough it had turned out to be an idiotic thing to do. You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Out there?" said the man. "Out where?"
"Out there!" said Zarniwoop, pointing at the door.
"How can you tell there's anything out there?" said the man politely. "The door's closed.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“It faintly irritated him that Zaphod had to impose some ludicrous fantasy on to the scene to make it work for him. All this Margrathea nonsense seemed juvenile. 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

“Seven and a half million years our race has waited for this Great and Hopefully Enlightening Day!” cried the cheerleader. “The Day of the Answer!” Hurrahs burst from the ecstatic crowd. “Never again,” cried the man, “never again will we wake up in the morning and think Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Does it really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don’t get up and go to work? For today we will finally learn once and for all the plain and simple answer to all these nagging little problems of Life, the Universe and Everything!” As the crowd erupted once again, Arthur found himself gliding through the air and down toward one of the large stately windows on the first floor of the building behind the dais from which the speaker was addressing the crowd. He experienced a moment’s panic as he sailed straight toward the window, which passed when a second or so later he found he had gone right through the solid glass without apparently touching it. No one in the room remarked on his peculiar arrival, which is hardly surprising as he wasn’t there. He began to realize that the whole experience was merely a recorded projection which knocked six-track seventy-millimeter into a cocked hat.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Ah, thank you,' said Ford. He and Arthur took their jynnan tonnyx. Arthur sipped his, and was surprised to discover it tasted very like a whisky and soda.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Trouble with a long journey like this,' continued the Captain, 'is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you’re going to say next.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The old me knew. The old me cared. Fine, so far so good. Except that the old me cared so much that he actually got inside his own brain--my own brain--and locked off the bits that knew and cared, because if I knew and cared I wouldn't be able to do it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“They were a double pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, which had been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The computer started to sing. “‘When you walk through the storm …’” it whined nasally, “‘hold your head up high …’” Zaphod screamed at it to shut up, but his voice was lost in the din of what they quite naturally assumed was approaching destruction.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you travelled. This will come to you as a profound personal shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.” “Why, what did she tell you?” “I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy