Douglas Adams > Quotes

“The word yellow wandered through his mind in search of something to connect with. Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Time blossomed, matter shrank away. The highest prime number coalesced quietly in a corner and hid itself away forever.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

“A sudden silence hit the Earth. If anything it was worse than the noise. For a while nothing happened. The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t. And still nothing happened.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He was also firmly and utterly opposed to all and any forms of cruelty to any animals whatsoever except geese.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“4 Population: None. It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: A Trilogy of Five

“His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this - "If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“What a wonderfully exciting cough,” said the little man, quite startled by it, “do you mind if I join you?” And with that he launched into the most extraordinary and spectacular fit of coughing that caught Arthur so much by surprise that he started to choke violently, discovered he was already doing it and got thoroughly confused. Together they performed a lung-busting duet that went on for fully two minutes before Arthur managed to cough and splutter to a halt.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Slartibartfast's study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library.”
― Douglas Adams

“For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone for long enough with a Swiss cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“He suddenly shivered: he experienced a momentary sensation that he didn’t understand because no one on Earth had ever experienced it before. In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be farther than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace,”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“A thoroughly ridiculous form of transport, but a thoroughly beautiful one.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?” “Yes, of course I do.” “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

“Quello che lo irritava di più era il fatto che la gente era solita chiedergli sempre per quale ragione era così irritato.”
― Douglas Adams, Guida galattica per gli autostoppisti

“aphod Beeblebrox crawled bravely along a tunnel, like the hell of a guy he was. He was very confused, but continued crawling doggedly anyway because he was that brave.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we’d all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services.” Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this. “That’s a pretty unpleasant way to behave, isn’t it?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“which is why he always concealed them”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about. “Yes,” he agreed with”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“All right,” said Ford, “just stop panicking!”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“To those who said that they had a feeling soap wasn't found in mines, the Captain had ventured to suggest that perhaps that was because no one had looked hard enough, and this possibility had been reluctantly acknowledged.”
― Douglas Adams

“Miró fijamente los instrumentos con el aire de quien intentara pasar de memoria de la escala Fahrenheit a la centígrada mientras la casa está en llamas.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“So, how are you?” he said aloud. “Oh, fine,” said Marvin, “if you happen to like being me, which personally I don’t.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“What's up?"
"I don't know," said Marvin. "I've never been there.”
― Douglas Adams

“Some people object to such a view of music, saying that if you reduce music to mathematics, where does the emotion come into it? I would say that it’s never been out of it. The things by which our emotions can be moved—the shape of a flower or a Grecian urn, the way a baby grows, the way the wind brushes across your face, the way clouds move, their shapes, the way light dances on the water, or daffodils flutter in the breeze, the way in which the person you love moves their head, the way their hair follows that movement, the curve described by the dying fall of the last chord of a piece of music—all these things can be described by the complex flow of numbers. That’s not a reduction of it, that’s the beauty of it. Ask Newton. Ask Einstein. Ask the poet (Keats) who said that what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“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: A Trilogy of Five

“They both sat on the pavement and watched with a certain unease as huge children bounced heavily along the sand and wild horses thundered through the sky taking fresh supplies of reinforced railings to the Uncertain Areas.”
― Douglas Adams, The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five

“You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.” “Hang on, can I write this down?” said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil. “You can pick up a copy at the spaceport,” said the old man. “They’ve got racks of the stuff.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“who pursued a brilliant academic career studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and the wave harmonic theory of historical perception,”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Then Frankie said: ‘Here’s a thought. How many roads must a man walk down?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Don’t stand there looking like a startled whatsisname, what are those things that aren’t seals? Much worse than seals. Big, blubbery things. Dugongs. Don’t stand there looking like a startled dugong. Why has that . . .”
― 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

“It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons. Curiously”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy