Douglas Adams > Quotes

“The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth—when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass—the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another—particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e., covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish. And what about matter transference beams? Any form of transport which involved tearing you apart atom by atom, flinging those atoms through the subether, and then jamming them back together again just when they were getting their first taste of freedom for years had to be bad news.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“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. He felt on the sudden like a cramped and zoo-born animal who wakes one morning to find the door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savanna stretching gray and pink to the distant rising sun, while all around new sounds are waking.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“it’s partly the curiosity, partly a sense of adventure, but mostly I think it’s the fame and the money . . .”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Bu büyüklükteki bir evrende eğer yaşam var olacaksa, kişinin orantı duygusu diye bir lüksü kaldıramayacağını
kesin olarak kanıtlamasıydı.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“managed to break my nose on my own knee, which, although it was clearly an extraordinary achievement, had the same effect on me that those geological upheavals had on whole civilizations in Rider Haggard novels—it effectively sealed me off from the outside world forever. Various”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“Ho pensato che una civiltà che era impazzita al punto di aver bisogno di includere in un pacchetto di stuzzicadenti una serie di dettagliate istruzioni per l'uso non era più una civiltà in cui potessi vivere restando sano di mente.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“sometimes unusually intelligent and sensitive children can appear to be stupid. But, Mrs. Benson, stupid children can sometimes appear to be stupid as well. I think that’s something you might have to consider.”
― 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

“Vogonska poezija je, naravno, treća najgora poezija u univerzumu. Druga najgora je poezija Azgota s Krije. Dok je njihov Zaslužni pjesnik Mrmljo Flatulentni izvodio svoju pjesmu “Oda maloj grudici zelenog plastelina koju sam pronašao u svome pazuhu jednog ljetnog jutra", četvero članova publike umrlo je od unutarnjeg krvarenja, a Predsjednik srednjegalaktičkog vijeća za dremuckave umjetnosti preživio je tako što si je odgrizao nogu. Mrmljo je navodno bio "razočaran" reakcijama publike, i baš se spremao početi s čitanjem svoga epa u dvanaest knjiga pod naslovom Moja najdraža grgljanja iz kade kad mu je njegovo vlastito debelo crijevo u očajničkom pokušaju da spasi život i civilizaciju iskočilo iz vrata i zadavilo mu mozak.
Najgora poezija svih vremena nestala je zajedno sa svojom autoricom, Paulom Nancy Millstone Jennings, iz Greenbridgea, Essex, Engleska, s uništenjem planeta Zemlje.”
― Douglas Adams, Vodič kroz galaksiju za autostopere

“And then whenever I stop and think – why did I want to do something? – how did I work out how to do it? – I get a very strong desire just to stop thinking about it. Like I have now. It’s a big effort to talk about it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The planet has-- or rather had-- a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.”
― Douglas Adams

“I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can't fix the weather - you just have to get on with it.”
― Douglas Adams

“I said I ordered us some foie gras.” “Oh,” said Arthur, vaguely. “Um, I always feel a bit bad about foie gras. Bit cruel to the geese, isn’t it?” “Fuck ’em,” said Ford, slumping on the bed. “You can’t care about every damn thing.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Es un error creer que cualquier problema importante puede solucionarse con ayuda de unas patatas.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The idea for the title first cropped up while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1971. Not particularly drunk, just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff Gössers after not having eaten for two days straight, on account of being a penniless hitchhiker. We are talking of a mild inability to stand up.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago,” continued Marvin. [...] “And that was with a coffee machine.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“In Relativity, Matter tells Space how to bend, and Space tells Matter how to move.”
― Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy Collection 5 Books Set by Douglas Adams

“Look,” said Zaphod, “will you get it into your heads? That’s just a recorded message. It’s millions of years old. It doesn’t apply to us, get it?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are Why
are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing
digital watches?”
― Douglas Adams

“Oh freddled gruntbuggly..." he began. Spasms wracked Ford's body - this was worse than even he'd been prepared for.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts

“he also had a device that looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million “pages” could be summoned at a moment’s notice.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“But what are you supposed to do with a manically depressed robot?” “You think you’ve got problems,” said Marvin,”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Yeah well …” Zaphod felt strangely powerless to take charge of this conversation, and Ford’s heavy breathing at his side told him that the seconds were ticking away fast. The noise and the shaking had reached terrifying proportions. He saw Trillian’s and Arthur’s faces white and unblinking in the gloom”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“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 carts, 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, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“If I were not an atheist, I think I would have to be a Catholic because if it wasn’t the forces of natural selection that designed fish, it must have been an Italian. I”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt