Douglas Adams > Quotes

“Bistromathics,” he said, “the most powerful computational force known to parascience.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Very nice,’ said Arthur. ‘Wonderfully nice. I don’t know when I’ve ever been anywhere nicer. I’m happy here. They like me, I make sandwiches for them, and . . . er, well that’s it really. They like me and I make sandwiches for them.’ ‘Sounds, er . . .’ ‘Idyllic,’ said Arthur, firmly. ‘It is. It really is. I don’t expect you’d like it very much, but for me it’s, well, it’s perfect.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“Seen from the outside, which it never is, the Restaurant resembles a giant glittering starfish beached on a forgotten rock. Each of its arms house the bars, the kitchens, the force-field generators which protect the entire structure and the decayed hunk of planet on which it sits, and the Time Turbines which slowly rock the whole affair backward and forward across the crucial moment.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Have you met Thor? He makes thunder.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“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.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“The Answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe and Everything is…42!”
― Douglas Adams

“Arthur paused, warily. “You going to ask”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“If I ever meet myself,” said Zaphod, “I’ll hit myself so hard I won’t know what’s hit me.” Marvin”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sequence used the tropes of science fiction to talk about the things that concerned Douglas, the world he observed, his thoughts on Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He paused just long enough to make them feel they ought to say something, and then interrupted.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors.”
― 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

“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.’ ‘Buzz them?’ Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. ‘Yeah,’ said Ford, ‘they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their head and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really.”
― Douglas Adams, The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five

“This must be Thursday, I could never get the hang of Thursdays.”

Arthur Dent”
― Douglas Adams, Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Book 1 of 3

“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 – whilst 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.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief?”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Numbers written on restaurant bills 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. This single fact took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of maths was put back by years.”
― Douglas Adams

“the recession came and we decided it would save a lot of bother if we just slept through it. So we programmed the computers to revive us when it was all over.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“No livro seguinte, a história é retomada cinco anos depois e é possível, afirmam alguns, exagerar na discrição. 'Esse tal de Arthur Dent', faz-se ouvir o grito provindo dos cantos mais longínquos da Galáxia, que agora foi até mesmo encontrado inscrito em uma misteriosa sonda espacial, supostamente originária de uma galáxia alienígena e vinda de uma distância demasiado horrorosa para sequer ser ponderada, 'o que é ele, um homem ou um rato? Será possível que não se interesse por nada além de chá e das questões mais amplas da existência? Não tem vigor? Não tem personalidade? Será que, em outras palavras, ele não trepa?'.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“I gave a speech once,” he said suddenly and apparently unconnectedly. “You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.” “Er, five,” said the mattress. “Wrong,” said Marvin. “You see?” The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“But imagine for a moment such a person attempting to leave the country, armed with no passport, no credit cards, merely the power to throw thunderbolts and who knew what else. You would probably have to imagine a scene very similar to the one that did in fact occur at Terminal Two, Heathrow. But why, if you were a Norse god, would you be needing to leave the country by means of a scheduled airline? Surely there were other means? Dirk rather thought that one of the perks of being an immortal divine might be the ability to fly under your own power. From what he remembered of his reading of the Norse legends many years ago, the gods were continually flying all over the place, and there was never any mention of them hanging around in departure lounges eating crummy buns. Admittedly, the world was not, in those days, bristling with air-traffic controllers, radar, missile-warning systems and such like. Still, a quick hop across the North Sea shouldn’t be that much of a problem for a god, particularly if the weather was in your favor, which, if you were the God of Thunder, you would pretty much expect it to be, or want to know the reason why.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“But how are you, metalman?” said Ford. “Very depressed.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“It might not even have made much difference to them if they’d known exactly how much power the President of the Galaxy actually wielded: none at all. Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost immediately.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Esta no es la historia de la muchacha. Sino la de aquella catástrofe terrible y estúpida, y la de algunas de sus consecuencias. También es la historia de un libro, titulado Guía del autoestopista galáctico; no se trata de un libro terrestre, pues nunca se publicó en la Tierra y, hasta que ocurrió la terrible catástrofe, ningún terrícola lo vio ni oyó hablar de él.”
― Douglas Adams, Los autoestopistas galácticos: Guía del autoestopista galáctico, El restaurante del fin del mundo, La vida, el universo y todo lo demás

“Era tempo, diceva l'oroscopo, di agire con positiva fermezza, prendere ardue decisioni, vedere cosa occorresse fare e farlo. Era tutto assai difficile per lui, ma, sapeva il Capo, nessuno aveva mai detto che fare cose difficili non fosse difficile.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“There is an art, it says, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it. The first part is easy.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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