Douglas Adams > Quotes

“Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“There was only one thing in the room that was different.
For a moment or so he couldn't see what the one thing that was different was, because it too was covered in a film of disgusting dust. Then his eyes caught it and stopped.
It was next to a battered old television on which it was only possible to watch Open University Study Courses, because if it tried to show anything more exciting it would break down.
It was a box.
Arthur pushed himself up on his elbows and peered at it.
It was a grey box, with a kind of dull lustre to it. It was a cubic grey box, just over a foot on a side. It was tied with a single grey ribbon, knotted into a neat bow on the top.
He got up, walked over and touched it in surprise. Whatever it was was clearly gift-wrapped, neatly and beautifully, and was waiting for him to open it.
Cautiously, he picked it up and carried it back to the bed. He brushed the dust off the top and loosened the ribbon. The top of the box was a lid, with a flap tucked into the body of the box.
He untucked it and looked into the box. In it was a glass globe, nestling in fine grey tissue paper. He drew it out, carefully. It wasn't a proper globe because it was open at the bottom, or, as Arthur realized turning it over, at the top, with a thick rim. It was a bowl. A fish bowl.
It was made of the most wonderful glass perfectly transparent, yet with an extraordinary silver-grey quality as if crystal and slate had gone into its making.
Arthur slowly turned it over and over in his hands. It was one of the most beautiful objects he had ever seen, but he was entirely perplexed by it. He looked into the box, but other than the tissue paper there was nothing. On the outside of the box there was nothing.
He turned the bowl round again. It was wonderful. It was exquisite. But it was a fish bowl.
He tapped it with his thumbnail and it rang with a deep and glorious chime which was sustained for longer than seemed possible, and when at last it faded seemed not to die away but to drift off into other worlds, as into a deep sea dream.
Entranced, Arthur turned it round yet again, and this time the light from the dusty little bedside lamp caught it at a different angle and glittered on some fine abrasions on the fish bowl's surface. He held it up, adjusting the angle to the light, and suddenly saw clearly the finely engraved shapes of words shadowed on the glass.
"So Long," they said, "and Thanks ..."
And that was all. He blinked, and understood nothing.
For fully five more minutes he turned the object round and around, held it to the light at different angles, tapped it for its mesmerizing chime and pondered on the meaning of the shadowy letters but could find none. Finally he stood up, filled the bowl with water from the tap and put it back on the table next to the television. He shook the little Babel fish from his ear and dropped it, wriggling, into the bowl. He wouldn't be needing it any more, except for
watching foreign movies”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“Die Zeit ist eine Illusion. Die Mittagszeit erst recht.”
― Douglas Adams, Douglas Adams, Per Anhalter Durch Die Galaxis - Comic 1

“uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“We always had the greatest arguments over sex and fishing.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath. The”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it? It’s a sort of … yawning, tingling sensation in my … my … well, I suppose I’d better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let’s call it my stomach.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“İçkisinin başına ciddi bir şey gelmeden onu hemen kafasına dikmiş ve sonra birinciyi izleyip halinden memnun olup olmadığını anlayabilmesi için ikinciyi de midesine göndermişti.”
― Douglas Adams

“She then spent another hour dithering about what to wear. At last she settled on a smart little black dress she'd got in New York. She phoned a friend to see who was likely to be at the club that evening, and was told that it was closed this evening for a private wedding party.

She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from the supermarket. You get one of those trolleys which simply will not go in the direction you push it and end up just having to buy completely different stuff. What do you do with it? What do you do with the recipe? She didn't know.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Las reglas del Ultracriquet Brockiano:
(...)
REGLA TERCERA: Ponga a su equipo y al grupo contrario en un campo grande y construya un muro alto en torno a ellos. La razón de ello es que, si bien el juego es un gran deporte de masas, la frustración experimentada por el público al no poder ver lo que pasa, les lleva a imaginar que se trata de algo mucho más emocionante de lo que en realidad es. Una multitud que acabe de presenciar un partido más bien aburrido experimenta mucha menos afirmación vital que una muchedumbre que cree que acaba de perderse el acontecimiento más dramático de la historia del deporte.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“So you see, the major difference between someone of my age and someone of yours is not how much I know, but how much I’ve forgotten”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“but 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

“Zaphod si girò verso Ford con espressione stravolta.
- Ford - disse - quante capsule di salvataggio ci sono? -
- Nessuna - disse Ford.
- Le hai contate? - urlò Zaphod
- Sì, due volte -”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“But we have also,’ continued the management consultant, ‘run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut.’
Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.
‘So in order to obviate this problem,’ he continued, ‘and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and . . . er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“None of them was entirely satisfactory: either the climate wasn't quite right in the latter part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was exactly the wrong shade of pink.”
― Douglas Adams

“They obstinately persisted in their absence”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr have therefore been designated acting editors, and Lig’s desk is still preserved the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign which says ‘Lig Lury Jr, Editor, Missing, presumed fed’.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?”

Zarniwoop stared at him. The steam began to rise from his sodden clothes.

"So you answer all questions like this?" he said.

The man answered quickly.

"I say what occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Neden?" sorusu her zaman yanıtlaması en güç soru olmuştur. Birisi size "Saat kaç?" ya da "1066 savaşı ne zaman başlamıştır?" ya da "Şu frene basıldığında sıkışan emniyet kemeri nasıl çalışır, baba?" sorularını sorduğunda durumunuz bellidir. Vereceğiniz yanıtlar kolaydır ve sırasıyla şöyledir. "Akşam yedi otuzbeş", "Sabah on çeyrekte" ve "Aptal aptal sorular sorma!”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. “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 Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Bay L. Prosser, söylenenlere bakılırsa sıradan bir insandı. Bir başka deyişle, maymundan gelme, karbon temelli ve iki ayaklı bir yaşam biçimiydi.”
― Douglas Adams

“The words seem oddly dated, don’t they? It all sounds rather naïve and sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is snarl and take drugs.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Complete Trilogy in Five Parts

“His white hair seemed to be waving at someone it knew in the next room.”
― Douglas Adams

“NO ADMITTANCE.
NOT EVEN TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.
YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.
GO AWAY.”
― Douglas Adams

“He felt that the more time he spent away out in the Galaxy the more it seemed that the number of things he didn't know anything about actually increased.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl slurrp uuuurgh”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy