Douglas Adams > Quotes

“A slight hiss built into a deafening roar of rushing air as the outer hatchway opened onto an empty blackness studded with tiny, impossibly bright points of light. Ford and Arthur popped into outer space like corks from a toy gun.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The Guide says that there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“You barbarians!” he yelled. “I’ll sue the council for every penny it’s got! I’ll have you hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled … until … until … until you’ve had enough.” Ford was running after him very fast. Very very fast. “And then I will do it again!” yelled Arthur. “And when I’ve finished I will take all the little bits, and I will jump on them!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“It’s just that it’s a good idea not to let him have your phone number unless you possess an industrial-grade answering machine.” “What? Why’s that?” “Well, he’s one of those people who can only think when he’s talking. When he has ideas, he has to talk them out to whoever will listen. Or, if the people themselves are not available, which is increasingly the case, their answering machines will do just as well. He just phones them up and talks at them. He has one secretary whose sole job is to collect tapes from people he might have phoned, transcribe them, sort them and give him the edited text the next day in a blue folder.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of himself to see where he might be hurt. Wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“The officer’s next point was that I wasn’t in the universe, I was in England, a point that has been made to me before.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Suddenly Arthur began to feel his apparently nonexistent scalp begin to crawl as he found himself moving slowly but inexorably forward toward the console, but it was only a dramatic zoom on the part of whoever had made the recording, he assumed. “I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me,” intoned Deep Thought, his voice regaining its accustomed declamatory tones. “A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate—and yet I will design it for you. A computer that can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year program! Yes! I shall design this computer for you. And I shall name it also unto you. And it shall be called … the Earth.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Uncomprehending terror settled on the watching people of Earth. The terror moved slowly through the gathered crowds as if they were iron filings on a sheet of board and a magnet was moving beneath them. Panic sprouted again, desperate fleeing panic, but there was nowhere to flee to. Observing this, the Vogons turned on their PA again. It said: “There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.” The PA fell silent again and its echo drifted off across the land. The”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“I figure this,” said Zaphod. “Whatever happened to my mind, I did it. And I did it in such a way that it wouldn’t be detected by the Government screening tests.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? ‘Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ” “I reject that entirely,” said Dirk sharply. “The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Есть гипотеза, что в миг, когда кто-то постигнет истинное предназначение Вселенной и причины ее существования, она немедленно исчезнет, а на ее месте возникнет нечто еще более странное и необъяснимое. Есть и другая гипотеза, гласящая, что это уже произошло.”
― Adams Duglas, Автостопом по Галактике. Ресторан "У конца Вселенной"

“The daylight shouldered its way in like a squad of policemen and did a lot of what’s-all-thising around the room,”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“The Guide says that there is an art to flying,’ said Ford, ‘or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“What the photon is it?” “Oh, just some five-million-year-old tape that’s being broadcast at us.” “A what? A recording?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Ford leaped to the controls—only a few of them made any immediate sense to him so he pulled those. The ship shook and screamed as its guidance rocket jets tried to push it every which way simultaneously. He released half of them and the ship spun round in a tight arc and headed back the way it had come, straight toward the oncoming missiles. Air cushions ballooned out of the walls in an instant as everyone was thrown against them. For a few seconds the inertial forces held them flattened and squirming for breath, unable to move. Zaphod struggled and pushed in manic desperation and finally managed a savage kick at a small lever”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The impossible did not bother him unduly. If it could not possibly be done, then obviously it had been done impossibly. The question was how?”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Richard stood transfixed for a moment or two, wiped his forehead again, and gently replaced the phone as if it were an injured hamster. His brain began to buzz gently and suck its thumb. Lots of little synapses deep inside his cerebral cortex all joined hands and started dancing around and singing nursery rhymes.”
― Douglas Adams

“began to let his mind wander, trailing his fingers along the edge of an incomprehensible computer bank. He reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words Please do not press this button again.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of each division of your company.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Dirk nearly exploded with pain and howled so loudly that he almost attracted the attention of a waiter.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“He wasn't certain whether he had just got space-sickness or religion.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“His wife of course wanted climbing roses, but he wanted axes. He didn’t know why—he just liked axes. He flushed hotly under the derisive grins of the bulldozer drivers. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, but it was equally uncomfortable on each. Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn’t him.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“As zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it is like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the titles of books that will now never be read.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“May I urge you to consider my liver?” asked the animal, “it must be very rich and tender by now, I’ve been force-feeding myself for months.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels. He loved talking to audiences. He liked writing screenplays. He liked being at the cutting edge of technology and inventing”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“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

“A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far less life affirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“One of the things Ford Perfect 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've fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy