Douglas Adams > Quotes

“Oh, hello, Arthur Dent here. Look, sorry I haven’t been in for six months but I’ve gone mad.” “Oh, not to worry. Thought it was probably something like that. Happens here all the time. How soon can we expect you?” “When do hedgehogs start hibernating?” “Sometime in spring, I think.” “I’ll be in shortly after that.” “Righty-ho.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“That is the first thing anybody has said to me for seventeen years, three months and two days, five hours, nineteen minutes and twenty seconds. I’ve been counting.” He”
― 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

“To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“he had turned unfathomability into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naïve incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”
― Douglas Adams, The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five

“when John Lloyd was putting together the Not 1982 calendar, and was stuck for things to put on the bottoms of the pages (and also the tops and quite a few middles). He turned out the drawer, chose a dozen or so of the best new words, and inserted them in the book under the name Oxtail English Dictionary. This quickly turned out to be one of the most popular bits of Not 1982, and the success of the idea in this small scale suggested the possibility of a book devoted to it—and here it is: The Meaning of Liff, the product of a hard lifetime’s work studying and chronicling the behaviour of man. From”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief,”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Hey, what’s this bomb thing?” said Zaphod in alarm to Marvin. “The supernova bomb?” said Marvin. “It’s a very, very small bomb.” “Yeah?” “That would destroy the Universe completely,” added Marvin. “Good idea, if you ask me.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“And between them, the Dwellers in the Forest looked up into the sky and saw the sigh of the new star, and saw it with fear and apprehension, for though they had never seen anything like it before, they too knew precisely what it foreshadowed, and they bowed their heads in despair.

They knew that when the rains came, it was a sign.

When the rains departed, it was a sign.

When the winds rose, it was a sign.

When the winds fell, it was a sign.

When in the land there was born at midnight of a full moon a goat with three heads, that was a sign.

When in the land there was born at some time in the afternoon a perfectly normal cat or pig with no birth complications at all, or even just a child with a retrousse nose, that too would often be taken as a sign.

So there was no doubt at all that a new star in the sky was a sign of a particularly spectacular order.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs. They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul

“Uma posição radicalmente ateísta pode até significar que sua vida é uma corrida rumo ao esquecimento – mas ao menos você pode fazer isso com estilo.”
― Douglas Adams

“economic recession?” “Well, you see, five million years ago the Galactic economy collapsed, and seeing that custom-built planets are something of a luxury commodity, you see …”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Well, to cut a long story short, Reg, I ended up working for WayForward Technologies .”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.’” As”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“On prehistoric Earth he had lived in a cave, not a nice cave, a lousy cave, but . . . There was no but. It had been a totally lousy cave and he had hated it. But he had lived in it for five years, which made it a home of some kind, and a person likes to keep track of his homes. Arthur Dent was such a person and so he went to Exeter to buy a computer.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“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. ‘And shouting, sure,’ said Ford patting the blubbery arm clamped round his neck in friendly condescension, ‘. . . and he doesn’t even know why he’s doing it!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“This was the gist of the notice. It said, ‘The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.’
This has led to some interesting consequences. For instance, when the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Traal literally (it said ‘Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists’ instead of ‘Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists’) they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening’s ultragolf.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her. ‘Why’s this fish so bloody good?’ he demanded, angrily. ‘Please excuse my friend,’ said Fenchurch to the startled waitress. ‘I think he’s having a nice day at last.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“The legend is this:
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do. “Make ’em dry” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.” It is by eating sandwiches in pubs at Saturday lunchtime that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins there are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat. If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his cats on a back stair in Stepney.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Surely the notion that great lumps of rock whirling in space knew something about your day that you didn't must take a bit of a knock from the fact that there was suddenly a new lump of rock out there that nobody had known about before.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“It’s all devastatingly true — except the bits that are lies”
― Douglas Adams

“Di me stesso so solo quel tanto che riesco a capire nelle mie attuali condizioni mentali. E le mie attuali condizioni mentali non sono buone.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“That is really amazing. That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing I think I'd like to steal it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Hey, guys,' he said, 'this is crazy. We did it. We finally got to where we were going. This is Milliways!'
'Milliways!' said Ford.
'Yes, sir,' said the waiter, laying on the patience with a trowel, 'this is Milliways—the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.'
'End of what?' said Arthur.
'The Universe,' repeated the waiter, very clearly and unnecessarily distinctly.
'When did that end?' said Arthur.
'In just a few minutes, sir,' said the waiter. He took a deep breath. He didn’t need to do this since his body was supplied with the peculiar assortment of gases it required for survival from a small intravenous device strapped to his leg. There are times, however, when whatever your metabolism you have to take a deep breath.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I love deadlines,” he said once. “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams

“The simplistic style is partly explained by the fact that its editors, having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it with a few foot notes in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly torturous Galactic Copyright Laws.

It’s interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backwards in time, through a temporal warp, and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the presidency, a decision that had sent shock waves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy. Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President? Many had seen it as clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Gordon Way, brother of Susan, employer of Richard MacDuff, was a rich man, the founder and owner of WayForward Technologies II. WayForward Technologies itself had of course gone bust, for the usual reason, taking his entire first fortune with it.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“...aslında bütün marifet kendini yere doğru fırlatıp yeri ıskalamakta yatar.

-----

'Cennet bahçesi. ağaç. elma. o ısırık, hatırlıyor musun?'

'Evet, elbette hatırlıyorum.'

'Sizin tanrınız, bir bahçenin ortasına bir elma ağacı koyar ve der ki, 'hey arkadaşlar ne isterseniz yapın, ama bu elmayı yemeyin.' sürpriz, sürpriz, elmayı yerler ve o da saklandığı çalının arkasından fırlayarak bağırır 'yakaladım, yakaladım.'oysa yemeselerdi de sonuçta bir şey değişmeyecekti.'

'Niye değişmesin?'

'Çünkü eğer karşındaki, kaldırıma içinde tuğla bulunan şapkaları bırakmaktan hoşlanan bir zihniyete sahipse, gayet iyi bilirsin ki bundan vazgeçmez, er ya da geç seni gafil avlar.'

'Sen neden söz ediyorsun?'

'Boş ver, meyveyi ye”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Hexagonal Phase

“So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy