Douglas Adams > Quotes

“Жизнь! - меланхолически произнес Марвин. - Можно ее презирать, можно не замечать, но любить?!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts

“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

“Desde luego, la ciencia ha logrado cosas maravillosas, pero yo preferiría, con mucho, ser feliz.”
― Douglas Adams

“Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one—more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Coluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who Is This God Person Anyway?”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“had come to suspect that the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“But Douglas was a genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, he could communicate the world he saw. Also, once you’d seen it his way you could never go back.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“In order that some sense of mystery should still be preserved, no revelation will yet be made concerning whose upper arm sustains the bruise. This fact may safely be made the subject of suspense since it is of no significance whatsoever.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“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.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“This was when the first major Muddles of Galactic history set in, with battles continually reerupting centuries after the issues they had been fought over had supposedly been settled. However, these muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had to try and unravel once time-travel was discovered and battles started preerupting hundreds of years before the issues even arose. When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole planets started unexpectedly turning into banana fruitcake, the great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which had been after them for years.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up: and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?’ ‘You ask a glass of water.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Research. Government archives. Detective work. Few lucky guesses. Easy.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“A steel door closed and the captain was on his own again. He hummed quietly and mused to himself, lightly fingering his notebook of verses. “Hmmm,” he said, “counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor …” He considered this for a moment, and then closed the book with a grim smile. “Death’s too good for them,” he said.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins. Gradually”
― 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

“[...] quattro persone che vi si trovavano a bordo si sentivano abbastanza inquiete, adesso che sapevano di essersi trovate insieme non di loro propria volontà, o per semplice coincidenza, ma per qualche incomprensibile bizzarria della fisica, quasi che i rapporti fra le persone fossero soggetti alle stesse leggi che governano i rapporti tra gli atomi e le molecole.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like. It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity— distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself. Arthur’s senses bobbed and spun as, traveling at the immense speed he knew the aircar attained, they climbed slowly through the open air, leaving the gateway through which they had passed an invisible pinprick in the shimmering wall behind them. The wall. The wall defied the imagination—seduced it and defeated it. The wall was so paralyzingly vast and sheer that its top, bottom and sides passed away beyond the reach of sight. The mere shock of vertigo could kill a man. The wall appeared perfectly flat. It would take the finest laser-measuring equipment to detect that as it climbed, apparently to infinity, as it dropped dizzily away, as it planed out to either side, it also curved. It met itself again thirteen light seconds away. In other words the wall formed the inside of a hollow sphere, a sphere over three million miles across and flooded with unimaginable light.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“To summarize: it is a well known fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. 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

“Čovjek pokraj Forda se dosad već malo nacvrcao. Oči su mu zavijugale do Forda.
"Mislio sam", rekao je, "da kad svijet propada treba leći na pod i staviti papirnatu kesu na glavu ili tako nešto."
"Ako hoćete, možete", reče Ford.
"Tako su nam rekli u vojsci", rekao je čovjek, a oči su mu krenule na dug put natrag do njegovog viskija.
"To će pomoći?", upita barmen.
"Ne", rekao je Ford im prijateljski se osmjehnuo.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Why do you do it? What is it? The girls? The leather? The machismo? Or do you just find coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

“didn’t deserve this sort of treatment; he was a dignified old man.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Arthur flipped through the brochure till he found what he was looking for. At the back there were a few maps of the planet. They were fairly rough and ready because they weren't likely to be of much interest to anyone, but they told him what he wanted to know.

He didn't recognize it at first because the maps were the other way up from the way he would have expected and looked, therefore thoroughly unfamiliar. Of course, up and down, north and south, are absolutely arbitrary designations, but we are used to seeing things the way we are used to seeing them, and Arthur had to turn the maps upside-down to make sense of them.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
― Douglas Adams, The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five

“Beyninin bir bölümü ona neye baktığını ve şekillerin neyi temsil ettiğini çok iyi bildiğini söylerken, başka bir bölümü de çok anlaşılır bir şekilde bu fikri desteklemeyi reddediyor ve bu yönde daha fazla düşünmesi halinde sorumluluk almayı kabul etmiyordu.”
― Douglas Adams

“He decided to feel sorry for himself. That would pass the time.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“In the winter time the temperature falls well below the legal minimum.”
― Douglas Adams

“No, I’m very ordinary,” said Arthur, “but some very strange things have happened to me. You could say I’m more differed from than differing.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path. Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn’t know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr. L. Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats. He was by no means a great warrior; in fact he was a nervous, worried man. Today he was particularly nervous and worried because something had gone seriously wrong with his job, which was to see that Arthur Dent’s house got cleared out of the way before the day was out. “Come off it, Mr. Dent,” he said, “you can’t win, you know. You can’t lie in front of the bulldozer indefinitely.” He tried to make his eyes blaze fiercely but they just wouldn’t do it. Arthur lay in the mud and squelched at him. “I’m game,” he said, “we’ll see who rusts first.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“She remembered wondering what it was that the Albanians exported in such an anonymous way, but when on one occasion she had looked it up, she found that their only export was electricity—which, if she remembered her high school physics correctly, was unlikely to be moved around in lorries.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“where hyperspatial engineers sucked matter through white holes in space to form it into dream planets—gold planets, platinum planets, soft rubber planets with lots of earthquakes—all lovingly made to meet the exacting standards that the Galaxy’s richest men naturally came to expect.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Computer,” said Zaphod, “tell us what our present trajectory is.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy