Douglas Adams > Quotes

“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

“Arthur checked himself into a small motel on the outskirts of town, and sat glumly on the bed, which was damp, and flipped through the little information brochure, which was also damp. It said that the planet of NowWhat had been named after the opening words of the first settlers to arrive there after struggling across light years of space to reach the furthest unexplored outreaches of the Galaxy. The main town was called OhWell.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Vogonci. Ne bi ni prstom makli čak ni da spase vlastitu baku od prožrdljive bubozdrobne zvijeri s Traaala bez naređenja u tri primjerka, preporučeno poslanih s povratnicom, poslanih natrag, traženih, izgubljenih, pronađenih, podnesenih na javnu raspravu, ponovno izgubljenih i konačno pokopanih u mekom močvarnom tlu i recikliranih kao upaljač. ”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The point is, you see,” said Ford, “that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Bistromathics is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that time was not an absolute and depended on the observer’s movement in space... so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Thus the planet Vogsphere whiled away the unhappy millennia until the Vogons suddenly discovered the principles of interstellar travel. Within a few short Vog years every last Vogon had migrated to the Megabrantis cluster, the political hub of the Galaxy, and now formed the immensely powerful backbone of the Galactic Civil Service. They have attempted to acquire learning, they have attempted to acquire style and social graces, but in most respects the modern Vogon is little different from his primitive forebears.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Resumo dos últimos capítulos:
No início, o Universo foi criado. Isso irritou profundamente muitas pessoas e, no geral, foi encarado como uma péssima ideia.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the end of the universe

“When I hear Mozart, I understand what it is to be a human being; when I hear Beethoven, I understand what it is to be Beethoven; but when I hear Bach, understand what it is to be the Universe.”
― Douglas Adams

“The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen is that it won't. That is not what "accident" means.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“There was a sort of gallery structure in the roof space which held a bed and also a bathroom which you could actually swing a cat in. But only if it was a reasonably patient cat and didn’t mind a few nasty cracks about the head.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem about changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them. That was the only real pizza. Pizza that you had to go out and sit at a table staring at red paper napkins for wasn’t real pizza however much extra pepperoni and anchovy they put on it. London was the place she liked living in most, apart, of course, from the pizza problem, which drove her crazy. Why would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand that it was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it arrived at your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it out of greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front of the TV?”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“He was rather disappointed to discover her name was Fenny. It was a rather silly, dispiriting name, such as an unlovely maiden aunt might vote herself if she couldn’t sustain the name Fenella properly.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth—when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass—the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another—particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e., covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn’t recognize huge wodges of human experience.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“Life',said Marvin,'don't talk to me about life”
― Douglas Adams, Douglas Adams' the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Authorized Collection

“Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says that if you hold a lungful of air you can survive in the total vacuum of space for about thirty seconds. However, it does go on to say that what with space being the mind-boggling size it is the chances of getting picked up by another ship within those thirty seconds are two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand, seven hundred and nine to one against. By a totally staggering coincidence, that is also the telephone number of an Islington flat where Arthur once went to a very good party and met a very nice girl whom he totally failed to get off with—she went off with a gate-crasher. Though the planet Earth, the Islington flat and the telephone have all now been demolished, it is comforting to reflect that they are all in some small way commemorated by the fact that twenty-nine seconds later Ford and Arthur were rescued.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Sawing a lady in half is easy. Sawing a lady in half and then joining her up together again is less easy, but can be done with practice.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I’ve been talking about how electronic books will come, and how important they will be, and all of a sudden Stephen King publishes one. I feel a complete idiot, as it should have been me.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Since Douglas died he has come to mind with astonishing frequency, which seems to be the experience of many who were close to him. His presence is still remarkably powerful nearly a year after his death, and I can’t help thinking he had a hand in the amazing ease with which this book came together. I know he would have keenly wanted you to enjoy it, and I hope you will.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“As soon as a predetermined quantity had been consumed, the final loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually obscenely biological. Ford Prefect usually played to lose.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in the destruction of the planet Earth.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Certamente era um homem que possuía muitas qualidades, mesmo que fossem quase todas ruins.”
― Douglas Adams

“Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash. Toothpaste on the brush—so. Scrub. Shaving mirror—pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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