Douglas Adams > Quotes

“Damn it and blast it, he thought, and felt the need of some guidance and advice. 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".”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“but do you really think it’s wise under the circumstances? I mean, here we are on the run and everything, we must have the police of half the Galaxy after us by now, and we stop to pick up hitchhikers.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“When the hunt for new sources of energy had at one point got particularly frantic, one bright young chap suddenly spotted that one place which had never used up all its available energy was - the past. And with the sudden rush of blood to the head that such insights tend to induce, he invented a way of mining it that very same night, and within a year huge tracts of the past were being drained of all their energy and simply wasting away. Those who claimed that the past should be left unspoilt were accused of indulgingin an extremely expensive form of sentimentality.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“One moment I was sitting in your ship feeling very depressed, and the next moment I was standing here feeling utterly miserable. An Improbability Field I expect.”
― Douglas Adams

“working overtime to make up for their earlier blunder. They brought”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“We were wrong about trains, we were wrong about planes, we were wrong about radio, we were wrong about phones, we were wrong about . . . well, for a voluminous list of the things we have been wrong about, you could do worse than dig out a copy of a book called The Experts Speak by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, and so the idea was lost, seemingly for ever. This is her story.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private house was there, but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds of miles of coastline that run west from Los Angeles, which is described in the new edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one entry as “junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what’s that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo,” and in another, written only hours later as “being like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth. Plus the air is, for some reason, yellow.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“We will go to Asgard . . . now,” he said. At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple, but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement. The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then snapped back again as a suddenly different world. This world was a much darker one and colder still.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“People think that if you just say 'hallucinations' it explains anything you want it to explain and eventually whatever it is you can't understand will just go away. It's just a word, it doesn't explain anything. It doesn't explain why the dolphins disappeared.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.” ‘“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.” ‘“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. ‘“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“She carried it through to him and asked if he felt like talking things through.

"Zark off," said Zaphod.

Trillian nodded patiently to herself, counted to an even higher number, tossed the tray lightly aside, walked to the transport room and just teleported herself the hell out of his life.

She didn't even programme any coordinates, she hadn't the faintest idea where she was going, she just went — a random row of dots flowing through the Universe.

"Anything," she said to herself as she left, "is better than this.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Ring-ring. Ring-ring. Ring-ring. “Hello, yes? Yes, that’s right. Yes. You’ll ’ave to speak up, there’s an awful lot of noise in ’ere. What? “No, I only do the bar in the evenings. It’s Yvonne who does lunch, and Jim he’s the landlord. No, I wasn’t on. What? “You’ll have to speak up. “What? No, don’t know nothing about no raffle. What? “No, don’t know nothing about it. ’Old on, I’ll call Jim.” The barmaid put her hand over the receiver and called over the noisy bar. “ ’Ere, Jim, bloke on the phone says something about he’s won a raffle. He keeps on saying it’s ticket 37 and he’s won.” “No, there was a guy in the pub here won,” shouted back the barman. “He says ’ave we got the ticket.” “Well, how can he think he’s won if he hasn’t even got a ticket?” “Jim says ’ow can you think you’ve won if you ’aven’t even got the ticket. What?” She put her hand over the receiver again. “Jim, ’e keeps effing at me. Says there’s a number on the ticket.” “ ’Course there was a number on the ticket, it was a bloody raffle ticket, wasn’t it?” “ ’E says ’e means it’s a telephone number on the ticket.” “Put the phone down and serve the bloody customers, will you?”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“She was tallish with dark hair which fell in waves around a pale and serious face. Standing still, alone, she seemed almost somber, like a statue to some important but unpopular virtue in a formal garden. She seemed to be looking at something other than what she looked as if she was looking at.

But when she smiled, as she did now, suddenly, it was as if she had just arrived from somewhere. Warmth and life flooded into her face, and impossibly graceful movement into her body. The effect was very disconcerting, and it disconcerted the Arthur like hell.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“Marvin'in göğsünün derinliklerindeki dişliler gıcırdadı. "Komik," dedi cenaze törenlerine çok uygun bir sesle, "tam hayat daha kötü olamaz derken birden her şey nasıl da daha kötüye gidiyor.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem. And”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“dried-out marsh, now barren of all vegetation and covered with a layer of dust about an inch thick. It was very cold. Zaphod was clearly rather depressed about it. He stalked off by himself and was soon lost to sight behind a slight rise in the ground. The wind stung Arthur’s eyes and ears, and the stale thin air clasped his throat. However, the thing that was stung most was his mind. “It’s fantastic …” he said, and his own voice rattled his ears. Sound carried badly in this thin atmosphere.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“SONSÖZ " Hayat, evren ve her şey”
― Douglas Adams, Guide to the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“no correspondence is intended between any institutions or characters in this book and any real institutions or people living, dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Well, I wouldn’t overstress that angle, you know,’ he said finally, ‘one’s never alone with a rubber duck.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“The room was much as Slartibartfast had described it. In seven and a half million years it had been well looked after and cleaned regularly every century or so. The ultramahogany desk was worn at the edges, the carpet a little faded now, but the large computer terminal sat in sparkling glory on the desk’s leather top, as bright as if it had been constructed yesterday.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.’ ‘Why, what did she tell you?’ ‘I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Bir BBS dedi, bizim göremediğimiz veya görmediğimiz ya da beynimizin görmemize izin vermediği bir şeydir, çünkü onun başka birinin sorunu olduğunu düşünürüz. İşte BBS'nin anlamı budur. Başka Birinin Sorunu. Beyin onu hemen yok eder, o adeta kör bir noktadır. Eğer ona doğrudan bakarsan, tam olarak ne olduğunu bilmediğin sürece hiçbir şey göremezsin. Tek şansın göz ucuyla onu gafil avlamaktır.”
― Douglas Adams

“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“I decided to call him Ford Prefect. (This was a joke that missed American audiences entirely, of course, since they had never heard of the rather oddly named little car, and many thought it was a typing error for Perfect.) I explained in the text that the minimal research my alien character had done before arriving on this planet had led him to think that this name would be “nicely inconspicuous.” He had simply mistaken the dominant life form.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Funny", he intoned funerally, "how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts

“Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep.
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Mr L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy