The Dirk Gently Omnibus Quotes

“It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.”
― 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

“coincidences are strange and dangerous things. Believe me, it is a great deal better to find cast-iron proof that you’re innocent than to languish in a cell hoping that the police—who already think you’re guilty—will find it for you.”
― 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

“Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.”
― 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

“What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself.”
― 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

“The sky clenched, a mountain of mud convulsed, earth and sky bellowed at each other, there was a horrible pinkness, a sudden greenness, a lingering orangeness that stained the clouds, and then the light sank and the night at last was deeply, hideously dark. There was no further sound other than the soft tinkle of water. But”
― 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

“In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or extinction, one thing has never been in doubt—that you would at least know the answer when you were dead. Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn’t the slightest idea what he was meant to do about it.”
― 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

“Dirk tried to imagine what might happen if—to pick a name quite at random—the God Thor, he of the Norwegian ancestry and the great hammer, were to arrive at the passport office and try to explain who he was and how come he had no birth certificate. There would be no shock, no horror, no loud exclamations of astonishment, just blank, bureaucratic impossibility. It wouldn’t be a matter of whether anybody believed him or not, it would simply be a question of producing a valid birth certificate. He could stand there wreaking miracles all day if he liked but at close of business, if he didn’t have a valid birth certificate, he would simply be asked to leave. And”
― 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

“We’re terribly worried about Uncle Henry. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ ‘Well, why don’t you send him to the doctor?’ ‘Well, we would, only we need the eggs.’ ” Standish stared at her as if a small but perfectly formed elderberry tree had suddenly sprung unbidden from the bridge of her nose. “Say that again,” he said in a small, shocked voice. “What, all of it?” “All of it.” Kate stuck her fist on her hip and said it again, doing the voices with a bit more dash and Southern accents this time. “That’s brilliant,” Standish breathed when she had done. “You must have heard it before,” she said, a little surprised by this response. “It’s an old joke.” “No,” he said, “I have not. We need the eggs. We need the eggs. We need the eggs. ‘We can’t send him to the doctor because we need the eggs.’ An astounding insight into the central paradoxes of the human condition and of our indefatigable facility for constructing adaptive rationales to account for it. Good God.” Kate”
― 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

“All day he had gone up to people, fallen into conversation with them, listened to their troubles, and then quietly uttered those three magic words, “I believe you.” The effect had invariably been electrifying.”
― 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

“He pulled himself up short. He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the way to . . . to . . . The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to. Brusquely”
― 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

“He seemed more like a succession of extraordinary events than a person.”
― 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

“Indeed, Bill, it is. You find me thriving. And Mrs Roberts? How is she? Foot still troubling her?” “Not since she had it off, thanks for asking, sir. Between you and me, sir, I would’ve been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them.”
― 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

“They were late and shook off their coats hurriedly. This was complicated for the older man by the necessity first of taking off his professorial gown, and then of putting it back on again once his coat was off, then of stuffing his hat in his coat pocket, then of wondering where he’d put his scarf, and then of realizing that he hadn’t brought it, then of fishing in his coat pocket for his handkerchief, then of fishing in his other coat pocket for his spectacles, and finally of finding them quite unexpectedly wrapped in his scarf, which it turned out he had brought after all but hadn’t been wearing despite the damp and bitter wind blowing in like a witch’s breath from across the fens. He”
― 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

“The stories had, of course, been offensive and callously insensitive and had largely been ignored by everybody in the country except for those very few millions who were keen on offensive and callously insensitive things.”
― 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

“These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase “too much Mozart” was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favor of any given program-scheduling strategy.”
― 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

“He had, of course, long ago taken the precaution of removing the only extant copies of the books on his reading list from the university and college libraries, as a result of which he had plenty of time to, well, to do whatever it was he did.”
― 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

“Don’t stand there looking like a startled whatsisname, what are those things that aren’t seals? Much worse than seals. Big, blubbery things. Dugongs. Don’t stand there looking like a startled dugong. Why has that . . .”
― 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

“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How”
― 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

“the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others.”
― 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

“Svlad Cjelli. Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, “popular” was hardly right. Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculated about, those too were true. But popular? Only in the sense that a serious accident on the motorway might be popular—everyone slows down to have a good look, but no one will get too close to the flames. Infamous was more like it. Svlad Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk.”
― 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

“who cursed and swore at him from a moral high ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit.”
― 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

“It seems odd, don’t you think, that the quality of the food should vary inversely with the brightness of the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinary heights the kitchen staff could rise to if you confined them to perpetual darkness.”
― 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

“If you wanted quick sex or a dirty fix or, God help you, a hamburger, that was where you went to get it. Here”
― 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

“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

“there emerged from the car a pair of the sort of legs which sound-track editors are unable to see without needing to slap a smoky saxophone solo all over, for reasons which no one besides sound-track editors has ever been able to understand. In this particular case, however, the saxophone would have been silenced by the proximity of the kazoo which the same sound-track editor would almost certainly have slapped all over the progress of the vehicle. The”
― 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

“It meant that the silently waged conflict between himself and his cleaning lady had escalated to a new and more frightening level. It was now, Dirk reckoned, fully three months since this fridge door had been opened, and each of them was grimly determined not to be the one to open it first.”
― 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

“The daylight shouldered its way in like a squad of policemen and did a lot of what’s-all-thising around the room, which, like the bedroom, would have presented anyone of an aesthetic disposition with difficulties.”
― 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

“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

“This was a public telephone so it was clearly an oversight that it was working at all.”
― 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

“The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly restlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape from a sack. His own age was on the older side of completely indeterminate. If”
― 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