Douglas Adams > Quotes

“Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Duty Free shops which are able to charge much lower prices than ordinary shops but - mysteriously - don't,”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“I think it’s even worse when you’re in a situation where the object of your desire is being nice to you and liking you, but that’s not enough, they’ve got to hate you or love you; anything in between is really upsetting and Arthur finds that very, very difficult. And”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“How can I tell,” said the man, “that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Now—either you all give yourselves up now and let us beat you up a bit, though not very much of course because we are firmly opposed to needless violence, or we blow up this entire planet and possibly one or two others we noticed on our way out here!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He didn’t look like an old hippie. Of course, you never could tell. His own elder brother had once spent a couple of years living in a Druidic commune, eating LSD doughnuts, and thinking he was a tree, since when he had gone on to become a director of a merchant bank.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Yes,” called out the sort of people who call out “yes” when comedians ask them if they’re having a wonderful time.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Just says prepaid ticket for Mr. Dirk Gently to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be collected. Were you not expecting to go to Albuquerque today, sir?”

“I was expecting to end up somewhere I didn’t expect, I just wasn’t expecting it to be Albuquerque, that’s all.”

“Sounds like it’s an excellent destination for you, Mr. Gently. Enjoy your flight.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago,' continued Marvin.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

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

“Asking people about their opinions is a very good way of making friends. Telling them about your own opinions can also work, but not always quite as well. Nowadays”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“Mr. Prosser said, “You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time, you know.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It’s quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a hen. Like most things, of course, it isn’t quite that simple.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“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 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The term ‘holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson. “Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson? “No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Out of the utter blackness stabbed a sudden point of blinding light. It crept up by slight degrees and spread sideways in a thin crescent blade, and within seconds two suns were visible, furnaces of light, searing the black edge of the horizon with white fire. Fierce shafts of color streaked through the thin atmosphere beneath them. “The fires of dawn …!” breathed Zaphod. “The twin suns of Soulianis and Rahm …!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul. Now it was a few record royalties, a few pieces of trendy furniture, a trinket to stick on your bathroom wall [...].”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Catfish Island was infested with feral cats. In other words, cats that have returned to the wild."

"I always think that's an artificial distinction. I think all cats are wild cats. They just act tame if they think they'll get a saucer of milk out of it.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?” “It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,” came a low growl from somewhere on the table, “without undergoing a prefrontal lobotomy.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase “too much Mozart” was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favor of any given program-scheduling strategy.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Water boiled up beneath the bubble, it seethed and spouted. The bubble surged into the air, bobbing and rolling on the water spout.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program. It’s funny how many of the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. You see there have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly ordering and analysing all the relevant facts so that they then point naturally towards the right decision. The drawback with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want.’

‘Yeeeess...’ said Reg’s voice from the kitchen.

‘Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion.

‘And I have to say that it worked brilliantly. Gordon was able to buy himself a Porsche almost immediately despite being completely broke and a hopeless driver. Even his bank manager was unable to find fault with his reasoning. Even when Gordon wrote it off three weeks later.’

‘Heavens. And did the program sell very well?’

‘No. We never sold a single copy.’

‘You astonish me. It sounds like a real winner to me.’

‘It was,’ said Richard hesitantly. ‘The entire project was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon. The deal put WayForward on a very sound financial foundation. Its moral foundation, on the other hand, is not something I would want to trust my weight to. I’ve recently been analysing a lot of the arguments put forward in favour of the Star Wars project, and if you know what you’re looking for, the pattern of the algorithms is very clear.

‘So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies over the last couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that the US Navy is using version 2.00 of the program, while the Air Force for some reason only has the beta-test version of 1.5. Odd, that.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I’ve never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I’ve seen a few and they’re never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you’re in the right frame of mind, which is usually about lunchtime. After”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“An automatic system,” he said and gave a small sigh. “Ancient computers ranged in the bowels of the planet tick away the dark millennia, and the ages hang heavy on their dusty data banks. I think they take the occasional potshot to relieve the monotony.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“They soared with ease, basking in electromagnetic rays from the star Sol, biding their time, grouping, preparing. The planet beneath them was almost perfectly oblivious of their presence, which was just how they wanted it for the moment.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“So what part did I play in all this? Well, none really. They completely ignored me for the whole twenty or thirty minutes. Which was perfectly fine, of course, I didn’t mind. But it did puzzle me, because early every morning they would come yelping and scratching around the doors and windows of my house until I got up and took them for their walk. If anything disturbed the daily ritual, like I had to drive into town, or have a meeting, or fly to England or something, they would get thoroughly miserable and simply not know what to do. Despite the fact that they would always completely ignore me whenever we went on our walks together, they couldn’t just go and have a walk without me. This revealed a profoundly philosophical bent in these dogs that were not mine, because they had worked out that I had to be there in order for them to be able to ignore me properly. You can’t ignore someone who isn’t there, because that’s not what “ignore” means.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I suddenly felt, well, terribly old as I watched a mudskipper hopping along with what now seemed to me like a wonderful sense of hopeless, boundless naïve optimism. I hoped that if its descendant was sitting here on this beach in 350 million years' time with a camera around its neck, it would feel that the journey had been worth it. I hoped that it might have a clearer understanding of itself in relation to the world it lived in. I hoped that it wouldn't be reduced to turning other creatures into horror circus shows in order to try and ensure them their survival. I hoped that if someone tried to feed the remote descendant of a goat to the remote descendant of a dragon for the sake of a little more than a shudder of entertainment, that it would feel it was wrong.

I hoped it wouldn't be too chicken to say so.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“Therefore we must be mad.’ ‘Nice day for it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five

“If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.”
― Douglas Adams, The 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 alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. 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 favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical.”
― Douglas Adams