Douglas Adams > Quotes

“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

“Where they are, how they are, there’s no way we can know and no way we can do anything about it. Do what I do.’ ‘What?’ ‘Don’t think about it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“Poor Arthur, you’re not really cut out for this life, are you?” “You call this life?” “You’re beginning to sound like Marvin.” “Marvin’s the clearest thinker I know.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Tanrım,” diye serzenişte bulundu Arthur, “olumlu ve akılcı tavırdan söz ediyorsun ama bugün yok edilen senin gezegenin değildi. Bu sabah uyandığımda rahat iyi bir gün geçireceğimi düşünüyordum. Biraz okuyacak, köpeği fırçalayacaktım... Şimdi saat öğleden sonra dört ve dünyanın dumanı tüten artıklarından altı ışık yılı ötede uzay boşluğuna atılmak üzereyim!”

Sayfa:74”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Secondary Phase

“Мнозина изказваха мнението, че поначало човечеството е допуснало огромна грешка, като е слязло от дърветата. А някои дори твърдяха, че дори и крачката към дърветата била погрешна и въобще не е трябвало да напускат океаните.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts: Tertiary, Quandary & Quintessential Phases

“A história de todas as grandes civilizações galácticas tende a passar por três fases distintas e identificáveis: a da Sobrevivência, a da Interrogação e a da Sofisticação, também conhecidas pelas fases Como, Porquê e Onde.
Por exemplo, a primeira fase é caracterizada pela pergunta "Como vamos comer?", a segunda pela pergunta "Por que comemos?" e a terceira pela pergunta "Onde vamos almoçar?".”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Not a lot," he said, and suddenly flashed one of those grins of his which always made people think he's been overdoing things recently and should try and get some rest.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“So what we have arrived at here—and although the first shock wave of this arrival was in 1859, it’s really the arrival of the computer that demonstrates it unarguably to us—is “Is there really a universe that is not designed from the top downward, but from the bottom upward? Can complexity emerge from lower levels of simplicity?”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Nevertheless, like every parking lot in the Galaxy throughout the entire history of parking lots, this parking lot smelled predominantly of impatience.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“She was, after all, a mathematician and astrophysicist by training and a television presenter by experience, and what science she had forgotten over the years she was more than capable of making up by bluffing.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Tricia loved New York because loving New York was a good career move. It
was a good retail move, a good cuisine move, not a good taxi move or a great
quality of pavement move, but definitely a career move that ranked amongst
the highest and the best. Tricia was a TV anchor person, and New York
was where most of the world’s TV was anchored. Tricia’s TV anchoring had
been done exclusively in Britain up to that point: regional news, then breakfast
news, early evening news. She would have been called, if the language allowed,
a rapidly rising anchor, but... hey, this is television, what does it matter? She
was a rapidly rising anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound
understand- ing of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world
and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care. Everybody
has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one
you care about, then everything else in life becomes eerily easy.
Tricia had only ever missed one opportunity. These days it didn’t even make
her tremble quite so much as it used to to think about it. She guessed it was
that bit of her that had gone dead.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“They wrapped themselves in animal skins and furs which Ford Prefect acquired by a technique he once learned from a couple of ex-Pralite monks running a mind-surfing resort in the Hills of Hunian.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed,”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“...maladjusted, socially isolated, sad, hunched, emotional cripple.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Evrim mi? dediler kendi kendilerine, Ne gereği var? ve daha büyük anatomik uygunsuzluklarını düzeltebilecek noktaya gelene kadar doğanın onlara vermeyi reddettiği şey olmadan da yaşadılar.”
― Douglas Adams, Otostopçu'nun Galaksi Rehberi

“A beach house,” he said, “doesn’t even have to be on the beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate,” he went on, “at boundary conditions.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The robot
could no longer lift his head, had not read the message. They lifted his head,
but he complained that his vision circuits had almost gone.
They found a coin and helped him to the telescope. He complained and in-
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sulted them, but they helped him look at each individual letter in turn, The
first letter was a “w”, the second an “e”. Then there was a gap. An “a”
followed, then a “p”, an “o” and an “l”.
Marvin paused for a rest.
After a few moments they resumed and let him see the “o”, the “g”, the “i”,
the “s” and the “e”.
The next two words were “for” and “the”. The last one was a long one, and
Marvin needed another rest before he could tackle it.
It started with an “i”, then “n” then a “c”. Next came an “o” and an “n”,
followed by a “v”, an “e”, another “n” and an “i”.
After a final pause, Marvin gathered his strength for the last stretch.
He read the “e”, the “n”, the “c” and at last the final “e”, and staggered back
into their arms.
“I think,” he murmured at last, from deep within his corroding rattling thorax,
“I feel good about it.”
The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time ever.
Luckily, there was a stall nearby where you could rent scooters from guys with
green wings.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“The first people to pour in were the missionaries: Catholics who arrived to teach the native populace that the Protestants were wrong and Protestants who came to teach that the Catholics were wrong. The only thing the Protestants and Catholics agreed about was that the natives had been wrong for two thousand years.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“Another world, another day, another dawn.
The early morning's thinnest sliver of light appeared silently.
Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: A Trilogy of Five

“Now. Having saved the entire human race from extinction I could do with a pizza. What say you to such a proposal?”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“you’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.’ ‘What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?’ ‘You ask a glass of water.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The socially correct way of pouring tea is to put the milk in after the tea. Social correctness has traditionally had nothing whatever to do with reason, logic, or physics. In fact, in England it is generally considered socially incorrect to know stuff or think about things. It’s worth bearing this in mind when visiting.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“thinking is not really something they are cut out for.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“You’d probably guessed that anyway. The Census report, like most such surveys, had cost an awful lot of money and told nobody anything they didn’t already know”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The moment became a longer moment, and suddenly it was a very long moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was coming from.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish