Douglas Adams > Quotes

“they were each grateful to retire to separate cabins and try to rationalize their thoughts.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Totally mad,” he said, “utter nonsense. But we’ll do it because it’s brilliant nonsense.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Poaching of one kind or another is, of course, the single most serious threat to the survival of the mountain gorillas, but it's hard not to wonder whether declaring open season on human beings is the best plan for solving the problem. We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“Because the air was thick with animal hair and dust, my nose was continually inflamed and runny, and every fifteen seconds I would sneeze. Any thought I could not explore, develop, and bring to some logical conclusion within fifteen seconds would therefore be forcibly expelled from my head, along with a great deal of mucus.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I’m sure we can come to some arrangement,” said Ford. “Excuse me!” he shouted.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“the two suns! It was like mountains of fire boiling into space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“His job was to push them open for us. He explained that this had become necessary because unfortunately the doors didn’t open automatically when you approached them, and some of their Japanese visitors would often just stand in front of them for whole minutes getting increasingly bewildered and panic-stricken until someone slid them open by hand.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“He dreamed at one point in his slumbers of New York. In his dream he was walking late at night along the East Side, beside the river which had become so extravagantly polluted that new lifeforms were now emerging from it spontaneously, demanding welfare and voting rights.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Trin Tragula—for that was his name—was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too”
― Douglas Adams

“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

“We did not, of course, speak Mandarin, but the question “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” has a familiar ring in any language. The mere idea of even attempting to account for ourselves defeated us. We settled instead for explaining, by means of elaborate mime and sign language, that we were barking mad. This worked. He accepted it, but then hung around in the background to watch us anyway.”
― Douglas Adams

“The door had to be forced open because of the astonishing accumulation of junk mail on the doormat. It jammed itself stuck on what he would later discover were fourteen identical, personally addressed invitations to apply for a credit card he already had, seventeen identical threatening letters for nonpayment of bills on a credit card he didn’t have, thirty-three identical letters saying that he personally had been specially selected as a man of taste and discrimination who knew what he wanted and where he was going in today’s sophisticated jet-setting world and would he therefore like to buy some grotty wallet, and also a dead tabby kitten.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting or can’t explain.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“His eyes passed over the solid shapes of the instruments and computers that lined the bridge. They winked away innocently at him. He stared out at the stars, but none of them said a word.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker S Guide to the Galaxy: Primary Phase

“Hi there! This is Eddie, your shipboard computer, and I’m feeling just great, guys, and I know I’m just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“There is of course an extremely good reason for wearing shorts when you’re young, even in the depths of an English winter (and they were colder then, weren’t they?). According to Wired magazine, we can’t expect to see self-repairing fabrics until about the year 2020, but ever since we emerged from whatever trees or swamps we lived in five million years ago, we have had self-repairing knees.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Elbette ki hayatla bağlantılı pek çok mesele vardır ve işte size onların en yaygın olanlarından birkaçı: İnsanlar neden doğar? Neden ölürler? Neden bu ikisi arasında geçen zamanın büyük bir bölümünü dijital kol saatleri takarak geçirmek isterler.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed,’ it said. Its voice was low and hopeless.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn’t exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know you’ve taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“If you took the whole of Norway, scrunched it up a bit, shook out all the moose and reindeer, hurled it ten thousand miles around the world, and filled it with birds, then you'd be wasting your time, because it looks very much as if someone has already done it.”
― Douglas Adams, [Last Chance to See] [By: Adams, Douglas] [November, 2009]

“The second strangest thing about the ship was watching the Somebody Else’s Problem field at work. They could now clearly see the ship for what it was simply because they knew it was there. It was quite apparent, however, that nobody else could.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe