Douglas Adams > Quotes

“What’s so great about being stuck in a dust cloud?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electronic abacus, but...'

'Oh, now, don't underestimate the abacus,' said Reg. 'In skilled hands it's a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work.'

'So an electric one would be particularly pointless,' said Richard.

'True enough,' conceded Reg.

'There really wasn't a lot this machine could do that you couldn't do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble,' said Richard, 'but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil.'

Reg looked at him quizzically.

'I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply,' he said. 'I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I'm sitting.'

'I'm sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?'

This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Bypasses are devices which allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast whilst other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they want to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“In space travel, all the numbers are awful.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Look,” said Zaphod, “I’m up to here with cool, okay? I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“He consulted The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He looked up ‘guidance’ and it said ‘See under ADVICE’. He looked up ‘advice’ and it said ‘See under GUIDANCE’. It had been doing a lot of that kind of stuff recently and he wondered if it was all it was cracked up to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Complete Trilogy in Five Parts

“Assumptions are the things you don't know you're making, which is why it is so disorienting the first time you take the plug out of a wash basin in Australia and see the water spiralling down the hole the other way round. The very laws of physics are telling you how far you are from home.”
― Douglas Adams

“Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won’t engulf my head, I can see by infrared, How I hate the night.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Ford,’ he said, ‘there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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

“Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust, or just fall apart where I’m standing?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“It deals with that most terrible and harrowing experience in life - trying to remember an address which somebody told you but you didn't write down.”
― Douglas Adams

“Zaphod’s just this guy, you know?”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smart-ass.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is, as has been remarked before often and accurately, a pretty startling kind of a thing.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“I’m afraid you cannot leave,' said Zarniwoop, 'you are entwined in the Improbability Field. You cannot escape.' He smiled the smile that Zaphod had wanted to hit and this time Zaphod hit it.”
― Douglas Adams

“I didn’t have a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day (as it then was) because I wasn’t in that financial league.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Funny old thing, life, isn’t it?”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Uma das coisas que Ford Prefect jamais conseguiu entender em relação aos seres humanos era seu hábito de afirmar e repetir continuamente o óbvio mais óbvio.”
― Douglas Adams, Whs Lit Rea Hit GUI to Galaxy

“Good luck to you. There is an awful lot of stuff you don’t know anything about, but you are not alone in this. It’s just that in your case the consequences of not knowing any of this stuff are particularly terrible, but then, hey, that’s just the way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Birinin verdiği tavsiyenin kalitesini anlamak için o kişinin yaşamına bakmak gerekir.”
― Douglas Adams

“For much of the time we were tramping through wet fields of sago, and a foolish but happy thought suddenly occurred to me. We were walking through the only known anagram of my name -- which is Sago Mud Salad.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“Ah,” said Arthur, “er …” He had an odd feeling of being like a man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman’s husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks about the weather and leaves again.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Old Thrashbarg said that it was the ineffable will of Bob, and when they asked him what 'ineffable' meant, he said look it up.
This was a problem because Old Thrashbarg had the only dictionary and he wouldn't let them borrow it. They asked him why not and he said that it was not for them to know the will of Almighty Bob, and when they asked him why not again, he said because he said so. Anyway, somebody sneaked into Old Thrashbarg's hut on day while he was out having a swim and looked up 'ineffable'. 'Ineffable' apparently meant 'unknowable, indescribable, unutterable, not be be known or spoken about.' So that cleared that up.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“a fresh breeze danced lightly through the trees, and the odd sensation that all the buildings were quietly humming”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“We live in strange times. We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“…San Francisco, which the Guide describes as a ‘good place to go. It is very easy to believe that everyone you meet there is also a space traveler. Starting a new religion for you is just their way of saying “hi.” Until you’ve settled in and got the hang of the place it’s best to say “no” to three questions out of any given four that anyone may ask you, because there are some very strange things going on there, some of which an unsuspecting alien could die of’.”
― Douglas Adams