Adams Douglas Quotes & Sayings

Dirk looked at her expressionlessly. Apart from being extremely good-looking in a blondish, willowyish kind of way, she was dressed well in an "I don't care what I wear, just any old thing that's lying around" kind of way that relies on extremely careful about what you leave lying around. — Douglas Adams

Share and Enjoy' is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints Division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium-sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years.
The motto stands
or rather stood
in three mile high illuminated letters near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax. Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the offices of many talented young Complaints executives
now deceased.
The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig," and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration. — Douglas Adams

Slartibartfast's study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library. — Douglas Adams

Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there's no point trying to look in that direction because it won't be coming from there. — Douglas Adams

The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must 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. — Douglas Adams

Presumably he would know what the Question to the Ultimate Answer is. It's always bothered me that we never found out." "Think of a number," said the computer, "any number. — Douglas Adams

Anything that happens, happens. — Douglas Adams

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived. — Douglas Adams

It is a farewell gift from the dolphins," said Wonko in a low quiet voice, "the dolphins whom I loved and studied, and swam with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their language, a task which they seemed to make impossibly difficult, considering the fact that I now realize they were perfectly capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to. — Douglas Adams

Mixture of pleasure and pain," he muttered. "Always does the trick. — Douglas Adams

So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly?' I asked.
He looked at me as if I were stupid.
'You die, of course. That's what deadly means. — Douglas Adams

The sun was beginning to dry out the mud that Arthur lay in. — Douglas Adams

The light was only just visible - except of course that there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light. — Douglas Adams

I don't believe there's a horse in your bathroom. — Douglas Adams

Shee, you guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off. — Douglas Adams

Arthur paused, warily. "You going to ask — Douglas Adams

the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.'" As — Douglas Adams

Research. Government archives. Detective work. Few lucky guesses. Easy. — Douglas Adams

When I was young I used to have this nightmare about dying. I used to lie awake at night screaming. All my schoolfriends went to heaven or hell, and I was sent to Southend. — Douglas Adams

If there's any real truth, it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. — Douglas Adams

Economic recession?" "Well, you see, five million years ago the Galactic economy collapsed, and seeing that custom-built planets are something of a luxury commodity, you see ... — Douglas Adams

At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - relief or despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking - 'wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant! — Gareth Roberts

How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present. — Douglas Adams

The secret of healthy hitchhiking is to eat junk food. — Douglas Adams

The people of New Zealand are generally terribly nice. Everybody we had met so far had been terribly nice to us. Terribly nice and eager to please. I realised now that all this relentless niceness and geniality to which we had been subjected had got to me rather badly. New Zealand niceness is not merely disarming, it's decapitating as well, and I had come to feel that if Just one more person was pleasant and genial at me I'd hit him. — Douglas Adams

Life, will be a very great deal less weird without you! — Douglas Adams

then sat down to do what every galactic hitchhiker ends up spending most of his time doing. They waited for a flying saucer to come by. — Douglas Adams

Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies - what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news? — Douglas Adams

For all my rational Western intellect and education, I was for the moment overwhelmed by a primitive sense of living in a world ordered by a malign and perverted god, and it coloured my view of everything that afternoon - even the coconuts. The villagers sold us some and split them open for us. They are almost perfectly designed. You first make a hole and drink the milk, and then you split open the nut with a machete and slice off a segment of the shell, which forms a perfect implement for scooping out the coconut flesh inside. What makes you wonder about the nature of this god character is that he creates something that is so perfectly designed to be of benefit to human beings and then hangs it twenty feet above their heads on a tree with no branches. — Douglas Adams

The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a shocking, incomprehensible sense of distance. He didn't know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with a new sense of respect, almost awe. — Douglas Adams

Whatever our bedtime was as kids, we could stay up an extra half hour if we were reading. My parents didn't care as long as I was under the spell of a Stephen King or a Douglas Adams. Now I read in bed. I read at work. I read standing in line. It's like, 'Hello, my name is Nathan and I am a reader.' — Nathan Fillion

I don't think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn't becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it's very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' — Douglas Adams

Zaphod marched quickly down the passageway, nervous as hell, but trying to hide it by striding purposefully. — Douglas Adams

He would have felt safe if alongside the Dentrassis' underwear, the piles of Sqornshellous mattresses and the man from Betelgeuse holding up a small yellow fish and offering to put it in his ear he had been able to see just a small packet of cornflakes. But he couldn't, and he didn't feel safe. — Douglas Adams

BOTOLPHS (pl.n) Huge benign tumours which archdeacons and old chemistry teachers affect to wear on the sides of their noses. — Douglas Adams

Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul. — Douglas Adams

I've just had an unhappy love affair, so I don't see why anybody else should have a good time. — Douglas Adams

Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job, aren't we? — Douglas Adams

The insurance companies involved had all claimed that this was, by any reasonable standards, an act of God. But, Dirk had argued, which god? Britain was constitutionally a Christian monotheistic state, and therefore any "act of God" defined in a legal document must refer to the Anglican chap in the stained glass and not to some polytheistic thug from Norway. — Douglas Adams

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now. — Douglas Adams

It's all right,' he insisted, 'I'm perfectly well. Thought I heard, well, a noise
that startled me. But it was nothing. Just overcome with the tea fumes, I expect — Douglas Adams

carbon-based bipedal — Douglas Adams

After a while he played with the pencil and the paper again and was delighted when he discovered how to make a mark with the one on the other. Various noises continued outside, but he didn't know whether they were real or not. He then talked to his table for a week to see how it would react. — Douglas Adams

It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this [Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species'] and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well. — Douglas Adams

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

Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff drink. — Douglas Adams

How to Leave the Planet 1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it's very important that you get away as soon as possible. 2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House - (202) 456-1414 - to have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA. 3. If you don't have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don't have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try. 4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible. 5. If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it's vitally important you get away before your phone bill arrives. Douglas Adams — Douglas Adams

Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying. — Douglas Adams

Let us be dreamers, thinkers, speculative philosophers, or as our spouses would have it: Idiots — Douglas Adams

Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression "it turns out" to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It's great. It's hugely better than its predecessors "I read somewhere that ... " or the craven "they say that ... " because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it is research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight. Anyway, where was I? — Douglas Adams

42 is a nice number that you can take home and introduce to your family. — Douglas Adams

Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see. — Douglas Adams

It is most gratifying," it said, "that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients, and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom in future lives ... thank you. — Douglas Adams

I've been talking about how electronic books will come, and how important they will be, and all of a sudden Stephen King publishes one. I feel a complete idiot, as it should have been me. — Douglas Adams

It's not so much an afterlife' Said Arthur, 'more a sort of apres vie — Douglas Adams

To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it, he [Douglas Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle. — Richard Dawkins

There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again. — Douglas Adams

I shall sit alone in a darkened room, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything but a little grey old head, and in that little grey old head a peculiar vision of hideous blue and gold dangling things flashing in the light, and the smell of sweat, cat food and death. — Douglas Adams

You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space 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

In most cases, however, the terror was extremely short-lived, as was the person experiencing the terror. — Douglas Adams

One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work - supposing you're trying to find out how a cat works
you take that cat apart to see how it works, what you've got in your hands is a non-working cat. The cat wasn't a sort of clunky mechanism that was susceptible to our available tools of analysis. — Douglas Adams

Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality. — Douglas Adams

But naturally my shoulder, sir,' mooed the animal contentedly, 'nobody else's is mine to offer. — Douglas Adams

It's just that it's a good idea not to let him have your phone number unless you possess an industrial-grade answering machine." "What? Why's that?" "Well, he's one of those people who can only think when he's talking. When he has ideas, he has to talk them out to whoever will listen. Or, if the people themselves are not available, which is increasingly the case, their answering machines will do just as well. He just phones them up and talks at them. He has one secretary whose sole job is to collect tapes from people he might have phoned, transcribe them, sort them and give him the edited text the next day in a blue folder. — Douglas Adams

There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound. — Douglas Adams

In the center lay the exploded carcass of a lonely sperm whale that hadn't lived long enough to be disappointed with its lot. — Douglas Adams

He turned it and turned it. They could see quite clearly in the fine tracery of its etchwork the words So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. — Douglas Adams

Alltami (n.)
The ancient art of being able to balance the hot and cold shower taps. — Douglas Adams

An island, on the other hand, is small. There are fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled [..] So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight - the locals wouldn't stand a chance. — Douglas Adams

Ford was humming something. it was just one note repeated at intervals. He was hoping that somebody would ask him what he was humming, but nobody did. if anybody had asked him he would have said he was humming the first line of a Noel Coward song called "Mad About the Boy" over and over again. it would then have been pointed out to him that he was only singing one note, to which he would have replied that for reasons that he hoped would be apparent, he was omitting the "About the Boy" bit. he was annoyed that nobody asked. — Douglas Adams

Anyone who can go through Hyde Park on a summer's evening and not feel moved by it is probably going through in an ambulance with the sheet pulled over their face. — Douglas Adams

Time doesn't necessarily happen in chronological order. — Douglas Adams

Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. — Douglas Adams

And what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterward. — Douglas Adams

Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent, said the old man, sternly. — Douglas Adams

plaintively. Ford — Douglas Adams

And so the problem remained; — Douglas Adams

But Douglas was a genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, he could communicate the world he saw. — Douglas Adams

Time blossomed, matter shrank away. The highest prime number coalesced quietly in a corner and hid itself away for ever. — Douglas Adams

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees. — Douglas Adams

But now he felt as if the whole world were tipping backwards over his head, and this, he couldn't help feeling, was a very worrying thing for the world to do. — Douglas Adams

Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though. — Douglas Adams

It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the presidency, a decision that had sent shock waves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy. Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President? Many had seen it as clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas. Zaphod — Douglas Adams

I don't go to mythical places with strange men. — Douglas Adams

For instance, on the planet Earth, 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

Earth: mostly harmless — Douglas Adams

The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we'd all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services. — Douglas Adams

If I want to read something that's really giving me something serious and fundamental to think about, about the human condition, if you like, or what we're all doing here, or what's going on, then I'd rather read something by a scientist in the life sciences, like Richard Dawkins, for instance. — Douglas Adams

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife. — Douglas Adams

Much to his annoyance, a thought popped into his mind. It was very clear and very distinct, and he had now come to recognize these thoughts for what they were. His instinct was to resist them. — Douglas Adams

The air was stifling, but he liked it because it was stifling city air, full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music, and the distant sound of warring police tribes. — Douglas Adams

My God," complained Arthur, "you're talking about a positive mental attitude and you haven't even had your planet demolished today. I woke up this morning and thought I'd have a nice relaxed day, do a bit of reading, brush the dog. ... It's now just after four in the afternoon and I'm already being thrown out of an alien spaceship six light-years from the smoking remains of the Earth!" He spluttered and gurgled as the Vogon tightened his grip. — Douglas Adams

And we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere ... and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys. — Douglas Adams

Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. — Douglas Adams

There is another theory that states: This has already happened ... — Douglas Adams

Dirk was unused to making quite such a miniscule impact on anybody. He checked to be sure that he did have his huge leather coat and his absurd red hat on and that he was properly and dramatically silhouetted by the light on the doorway.
He felt momentarily deflated and said, "Er ... " by was of self-introduction, but it didn't get the boy's attention. He didn't like this. The kid was deliberately and maliciously watching television at him. — Douglas Adams

She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn't care. — Douglas Adams

Marvin the Paranoid Android sat slumped, ignoring all and ignored by all, in a private and rather unpleasant world of his own. — Douglas Adams

There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath. — Douglas Adams

The Universe is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do. — Douglas Adams