Douglas Adams > Quotes

“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

“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

“Life!” urged Fook. “The Universe!” said Lunkwill. “Everything!” they said in chorus.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Wearily I sit here, pain and misery my only companions. And vast intelligence of course. And infinite sorrow.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“The sun was beginning to dry out the mud that Arthur lay in.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Prima di allora non aveva mai capito che la vita ci parla, e che la sua voce dà risposta alle domande che le poniamo di continuo; non aveva mai captato consciamente quella voce, né riconosciuto i suoi toni fino a quel momento in cui la voce gli aveva detto una cosa che non gli aveva mai detto prima, e cioè: - Sì”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“What’s this fish doing in my ear?” “It’s translating for you. It’s a Babel fish. Look it up in the book if you like.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“And that reminds me: Random, I forbid you to marry a Vogon! RANDOM: You what? ARTHUR: Nothing. Just fulfilling a promise I made to myself a long time ago.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Further Radio Scripts

“Many speak of the legendary and gigantic starship Titanic, a majestic and luxurious cruise liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artrifactovol some hundreds of years ago now, and with good reason. It was sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge and more pleasantly equipped than any ship in what now remains of history (see page 113 [on the Campaign for Real Time]) but it had the misfortune to be built in the very earliest days of Improbability Physics, long before this difficult and cussed branch of knowledge was fully, or at all, understood. The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a prototype Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly, to ensure that it was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever go wrong with any pan of the ship. They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost immediately. The starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty sight as it lay beached like a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale among the laserlit tracery of its construction gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles of light against the deep interstellar blackness; but when launched, it did not even manage to complete its very first radio message—an SOS—before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“But how are you, metalman?’ said Ford. ‘Very depressed.’ ‘What’s up?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Marvin, ‘I’ve never been there.’ ‘Why,’ said Ford squatting down beside him and shivering, ‘are you lying face down in the dust?’ ‘It’s a very effective way of being wretched,’ said Marvin. ‘Don’t pretend you want to talk to me, I know you hate me.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“We’re terribly worried about Uncle Henry. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ ‘Well, why don’t you send him to the doctor?’ ‘Well, we would, only we need the eggs.’ ” Standish stared at her as if a small but perfectly formed elderberry tree had suddenly sprung unbidden from the bridge of her nose. “Say that again,” he said in a small, shocked voice. “What, all of it?” “All of it.” Kate stuck her fist on her hip and said it again, doing the voices with a bit more dash and Southern accents this time. “That’s brilliant,” Standish breathed when she had done. “You must have heard it before,” she said, a little surprised by this response. “It’s an old joke.” “No,” he said, “I have not. We need the eggs. We need the eggs. We need the eggs. ‘We can’t send him to the doctor because we need the eggs.’ An astounding insight into the central paradoxes of the human condition and of our indefatigable facility for constructing adaptive rationales to account for it. Good God.” Kate”
― 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

“In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioural research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“This,” said Slartibartfast, “is where we make most of our planets, you see.” “You mean,” said Arthur, trying to form the words, “you mean you’re starting it all up again now?” “No no, good heavens, no,” exclaimed the old man, “no, the Galaxy isn’t nearly rich enough to support us yet. No, we’ve been awakened to perform just one extraordinary commission for very … special clients from another dimension. It may interest you … there in the distance in front of us.” Arthur followed the old man’s finger till he was able to pick out the floating structure he was pointing out. It was indeed the only one of the many structures that betrayed any sign of activity about it, though this was more a subliminal impression than anything one could put one’s finger on. At that moment, however, a flash of light arced through the structure and revealed in stark relief the patterns that were formed on the dark sphere within. Patterns that Arthur knew, rough blobby shapes that were as familiar to him as the shapes of words, part of the furniture of his mind. For a few seconds he sat in stunned silence as the images rushed around his mind and tried to find somewhere to settle down and make sense. Part of his brain told him that he knew perfectly well what he was looking at and what the shapes represented while another quite sensibly refused to countenance the idea and abdicated responsibility for any further thinking in that direction. The flash came again, and this time there could be no doubt. “The Earth …” whispered Arthur. “Well, the Earth Mark Two in fact,” said Slartibartfast cheerfully. “We’re making a copy from our original blueprints.” There was a pause. “Are you trying to tell me,” said Arthur, slowly and with control, “that you originally … made the Earth?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a shocking, incomprehensible sense of distance. He didn’t know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with a new sense of respect, almost awe.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“...just as discretion was the better part of valor, so was cowardice the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in the closet.”
― Douglas Adams

“Try and understand his problem,” insisted Ford. “Here he is, poor lad, his entire life’s work is stamping around, throwing people off spaceships …” “And shouting,” added the guard.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“They were aware that this day they would represent their entire race in its greatest moment, but they conducted themselves calmly and quietly as they seated themselves deferentially before the desk,”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Hey, kid, you just saved our lives, you know that?"
"Oh, well, it was nothing really..."
"Was it? Oh well, forget it then”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Number Two's eyes narrowed and became what are known in the Shouting and Killing People trade as cold slits, the idea presumably being to give your opponent the impression that you have lost your glasses or are having difficulty keeping awake. Why this is frightening is an, as yet, unsolved problem.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Well. Now you put it like that I suppose …” “Good lad!” encouraged Ford. “But all right,” went on the rumblings, “so what’s the alternative?” “Well,” said Ford, brightly but slowly, “stop doing it, of course! Tell them,” he went on, “you’re not going to do it any more.” He felt he ought to add something to that, but for the moment the guard seemed to have his mind occupied pondering that much. “Eerrrrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …” said the guard, “erm, well, that doesn’t sound that great to me.” Ford suddenly felt the moment slipping away. “Now wait a minute,” he said, “that’s just the start, you see, there’s more to it than that, you see ….” But at that moment the guard renewed his grip and continued his original purpose of lugging his prisoners to the airlock. He was obviously quite touched.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“When the girl sitting at the next table looked away for a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened. He sat sipping at the lukewarm cup and casting his mind back over the day.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“The ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is: 42”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy