Douglas Adams > Quotes

“Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion was the better part of valour, so was cowardice the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a cupboard.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: A Trilogy of Five

“Zbogom, i hvala za svu tu ribu!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“All right,” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to the Great Question . . .” “Yes . . . !” “Of Life, the Universe and Everything . . .” said Deep Thought. “Yes . . . !” “Is . . .” said Deep Thought, and paused. “Yes . . . !” “Is . . .” “Yes . . . !!! . . . ?” “Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The alien ship was already thundering towards the upper reaches of the atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void which separates the very few things there are in the Universe from each other.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“The only places you could ever feel were right were worlds you designed for yourself to inhabit—virtual realities in the electric clubs. It had never occurred to her that the real Universe was something you could actually fit into.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again,** "why?"**
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
"But that's terrible," said Arthur.
"Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.”
― Douglas Adams

“worked hard to blend himself into Earth society—with,”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.’ ‘And are you?’ ‘No. That’s where it all falls down, of course.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Questo pianeta ha – o aveva – un problema, e il problema era che la maggior parte dei suoi abitanti era quasi costantemente infelice. Per rimediare al guaio furono suggerite varie proposte, ma queste perlopiù’ concernevano lo scambio continuo di pezzetti di carta verde, un fatto indubbiamente strano, visto che tutto sommato non erano i pezzetti di carta verde a essere infelici. E così il problema restava inalterato: un sacco di persone erano meschine e la maggior parte erano anche infelici, persino quelle fornite di orologi digitali.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen is that it won't. That is not what 'accident' means. The accident that eventually occurred was not what he had planned at all.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I love deadlines,” he has said. “I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression “it turns out” to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“How would an immortal being have a passport? Quite simply, how? Dirk tried to imagine what might happen if—to pick a name quite at random—the God Thor, he of the Norwegian ancestry and the great hammer, were to arrive at the passport office and try to explain who he was and how come he had no birth certificate. There would be no shock, no horror, no loud exclamations of astonishment, just blank, bureaucratic impossibility. It wouldn’t be a matter of whether anybody believed him or not, it would simply be a question of producing a valid birth certificate. He could stand there wreaking miracles all day if he liked but at close of business, if he didn’t have a valid birth certificate, he would simply be asked to leave.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“them, behind the trees, the strange Italian restaurant that had brought these, their real bodies, to this, the real, present world of Krikkit. The strong grass under their feet was real, the rich soil real, too. The heady fragrances from the tree, too, were real. The night was real night. Krikkit. Possibly the most dangerous place in the Galaxy for anyone who isn’t Krikkiter to stand.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“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. Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn’t – or wasn’t – a word for it, everyone thinks it’s something that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is ‘woking.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“Bir sokak çöpçüsü olarak iyiydim, evet. Yollarda muazzam pislik vardı. Gereğinden fazla, diye düşünüyordum, tam bir meslek olarak desteklenecek kadar. Bununla birlikte çöpümü süpürüp bir başka çöpçünün sahasına attığım için işten kovuldum.”
Reg başını salladı. “Senin için yanlış meslekmiş, eminim. Böyle bir davranışın hemen terfi getireceği bir sürü başka uğraş vardır.”
― Douglas Adams

“The robot camera homed in for a close-up on the more popular of his two heads and he waved again. He was roughly humanoid in appearance except for the extra head and third arm. His tousled fair hair stuck out in random directions, his blue eyes glinted with something completely unidentifiable, and his chins were almost always unshaven.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Complete Trilogy in Five Parts

“The little book of instructions suggested that he should simply concentrate ‘soulfully’ on the question which was ‘besieging’ him, write it down, ponder on it, enjoy the silence, and then once he had achieved inner harmony and tranquillity he should push the red button. There wasn’t a red button, but there was a blue button marked ‘Red’, and this Dirk took to be the one.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul

“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, unresolved problem. He”
― Douglas Adams, The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five

“Oh ah.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“I always thought that about the Garden of Eden story,’ said Ford. ‘Eh?’ ‘Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?’ ‘Yes of course I do.’ ‘Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, “Do what you like guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple.” Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting, “Gotcha.” It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Never mind, eat the fruit.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“Evren neyse oydu, kabul eder ya da onu terk edip giderdiniz.”
― Douglas Adams, Otostopçu'nun Galaksi Rehberi

“could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 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

“rectitude”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was a fairly typical Vogon in that he was thoroughly vile. Also, he did not like hitchhikers.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“İki kol, iki bacak ve bir kafa ile orada bir insanmışsın gibi durma cesaretini nerden buluyorsun sen? Bu davranışın dizanteriye neden olan amipleri bile utandıracak türden. Bahse girerim en alt gruptan bir dizanteri amibi bile, arada sırada ortaya çıkarak kız arkadaşını mide çeperinde bir gezintiye falan çıkarır.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“The safety of the crew is absolutely assured.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Evet. Bunlar bana en sonunda her şeyden el ayak çektirten sözcükler. Bu oldukça ani oldu. O sözcükleri gördüğümde ne yapmam gerektiğini biliyordum.”
Levhada şunlar yazılıydı:

Çubuğu ortasına yakın bir yerinden tutun. Sivri ucu ağzınızda ıslatın. İki diş arasındaki boşluğa sokun ve diş etine kadar ittirin. Nazik bir şekilde ileri geri oynatın.

“Bana sanki,” dedi Akıllı Wonko, “bir kürdan kutusuna ayrıntılı bir kullanma kılavuzu koyabilecek ölçüde aklını kaybetmiş herhangi bir uygarlığın içinde daha fazla yaşayıp da akıl sağlığımın yerinde kalması mümkün değilmiş gibi geldi.”
― Douglas Adams

“Lo spazio è vasto. Veramente vasto. Non riuscireste mai a credere quanto enormemente incredibilmente spaventosamente vasto esso sia. Voglio dire, magari voi pensate che andare fino alla vostra farmacia sia un bel tratto di strada, ma quel tratto di strada è una bazzecola in confronto allo spazio.”
― Douglas Adams, Guida galattica per autostoppisti