Douglas Adams > Quotes

“It seems to me that the whole field of humour could benefit from close and immediate scrutiny. Clearly we need to sort out the jokes which have any kind of genuine psychological value from those which merely encourage drug abuse and should be stopped.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“I’ve been ordered to take you down to the bridge.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“I don’t believe it. Prove it to me and I still won’t believe it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“MacDuff I knew at Cambridge.” “Oh, you did, did you? Describe him.” “Tall. Tall and absurdly thin. And good-natured. A bit like a preying mantis that doesn’t prey—a non-preying mantis if you like. A sort of pleasant genial mantis that’s given up preying and taken up tennis instead.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“And when I hear their questions, do you hear questions? What do their voices mean to you? Perhaps you just think they're singing songs to you." He reflected on this, and saw the flaw in the supposition.

"Perhaps they are singing songs to you," he said, "and I just think they’re asking me questions."

He paused again. Sometimes he would pause for days, just to see what it was like.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I wasn’t in the universe, I was in England, a point that has been made to me before.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“Bill Black is said to be one of the most experienced helicopter pilots in the world, and he needs to be. He sits like a cuddly old curmudgeon hunched over his joystick and chews gum slowly and continuously as he flies his helicopter directly at sheer cliff faces to see if you'll scream.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“„You see?“ said the official, examining the ultra-titanium outer seals the aorist rod hold. „ Perfectly secure, perfectly safe.“
He said the same thing as they passed holds containing chemical weapons so powerful that a teaspoonful could fatally infect an entire planet.
He said the same thing as they passed holds containing zeta-active compounds so powerful that a teaspoon could blow up a whole planet.
He said the same thing as they passed holds containing theta-active compounds so powerful that a teaspoon could irradiate a whole planet.
„I‘m glad I‘m not a planet,“ muttered Zaphop.”
― Douglas Adams , Young Zaphod Plays It Safe

“You can’t dodge your responsibilities by saying they don’t exist!”
― Douglas Adams

“I went upstairs. Took me a while to find my bag, and then there was someone else in the bathroom. Came down and he was gone.” Tricia paused. “And …?” said Gail. “The garden door was open. I went outside. There were lights. Some kind of gleaming thing. I was just in time to see it rise up into the sky, shoot silently up through the clouds and disappear. That was it. End of story. End of one life, beginning of another. But hardly a moment of this life goes by that I don’t wonder about some other me. A me that didn’t go back for her bag. I feel like she’s out there somewhere and I’m walking in her shadow.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“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 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Existe uma teoria que diz que, se um dia alguém descobrir exatamente para que serve o Universo e por que ele está aqui, ele desaparecerá instantaneamente e será substituído por algo ainda mais estranho e inexplicável.”
― Douglas Adams, Coleção Douglas Adams: Box Digital - O guia do mochileiro das galáxias - Coleção Completa - 5 livros em 1

“He waited and waited for another accident to happen. The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen is that it won’t. That is not what “accident” means. The accident that eventually occurred was not what he had planned at all.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“the vaguely uncomfortable feeling you got from sitting on a seat which is warm from somebody else’s bottom is just as real a feeling as the one you get when a rogue giant elephant charges out of the bush at you,”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“The females are bigger and more belligerent and often beat the males up. So when that happens, we collect semen from Pink, and—” “How do you do that?” asked Mark. “In a hat.” “I thought you said in a hat.” “That’s right. Carl puts on this special hat, which is a bit like a rather strange bowler hat with a rubber brim, Pink goes mad with desire for Carl, flies down and fucks the hell out of his hat.” “What?” “He ejaculates into the brim. We collect the drop of semen and use it to inseminate a female.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“The phone rang and Janice answered it. “Good afternoon,” she said, “Wainwright’s Fruit Emporium. Mr Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right in the head and thinks he is a cucumber. Thank you for calling.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts

“we presume to draw a distinction between what we call good and what we call evil. We find our images of what we call evil in things outside ourselves, in creatures that know nothing of such matters, so that we feel revolted by them, and, by contrast, good about ourselves.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time and had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that wants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will lend it some.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Why doesn’t all the money go to the writer, I hear you (and indeed myself) asking. Well, maybe it will if he’s happy just to drop his words into the digital ocean in the hope that someone out there will find them. But like any ocean, the digital one has streams and eddies and currents, and publishers will quickly have a role finding good material to draw into those currents where readers will naturally be streaming through looking for stuff, which is more or less what they do at the moment. The difference will lie in the responsiveness of the market, the speed with which those streams will shift and surge, and the way in which power and control will shift to those who are actually contributing something useful rather than just having lunch. The thing we leave out of the model is, essentially, just a lot of dead wood.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I go up," said the elevator, "or down."
"Good," said Zaphod, "We're going up."
"Or down," the elevator reminded him.
"Yeah, OK, up please."
There was a moment of silence.
"Down's very nice," suggested the elevator hopefully.
"Oh yeah?"
"Super."
"Good," said Zaphod, "Now will you take us up?”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“PRODO -explicó- es algo que no podemos ver, que no distinguimos o que nuestra mente no nos deja observar porque creemos que es un problema de otro. Eso es lo que significa PRODO. Problema de Otro. El cerebro se limita solamente a perfilarlo, es como un punto ciego. Si se mira directamente no se ve, a menos que se sepa qué es exactamente. La única esperanza consiste en percibirlo por sorpresa con el rabillo del ojo.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some kind of a grip, whether it’s the intoxicating seas of Santraginus V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra, where, they say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere. It will even live in New York, though it’s hard to know why. In the wintertime the temperature falls well below the legal minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79. In the summer it’s too darn hot. It’s one thing to be the sort of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do, that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very equable, but it’s quite another to be the sort of animal that has to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your planet’s orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin’s bubbling. Spring is overrated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they actually knew the first thing about the pleasures of spring they would know of at least 5,983 better places to spend it than New York, and that’s just on the same latitude. Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyway, so their opinion can and should be discounted. When it’s fall in New York, the air smells as if someone’s been frying goats in it, and if you are keen to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head in a building.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The Zaphod Beeblebrox?” “No, just a Zaphod Beeblebrox; didn’t you hear I come in six packs?”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. 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 Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“I don't want to die now! I've got a headache! I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Artık World Wide Web sözcüğü (kısaltılmış halinin -www- okunuşu, aslından daha uzun olan bildiğim tek terim) var ve bu heyecan verici yepyeni bir olay.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time