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He turned slowly like a fridge door opening. -- Douglas Adams
Didn't deserve this sort of treatment; he was a dignified old man. -- Douglas Adams
SHOEBURYNESS (abs.n.) The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from somebody else's bottom -- Douglas Adams
You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a hen. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. -- Douglas Adams
Don't spin your wheels and stress. Take a deep breath, center yourself and make a plan. -- Douglas Adams
His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He was a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose and it did keep him on the move. -- Douglas Adams
But what are you supposed to do with a manically depressed robot?" "You think you've got problems," said Marvin, -- Douglas Adams
You are, without doubt, holding in your hands one of the best-introduced books in the English language. We hope you enjoy the Introduction to the New Edition that follows this Introduction to it and continue to read on even into the book itself. -- Douglas Adams
Marvin," he said, "just get this elevator go up will you? We've got to get to Zarniwoop."
"Why?" asked Marvin dolefully.
"I don't know," said Zaphod, "but when I find him, he'd better have a very good reason for me wanting to see him. -- Douglas Adams
Very strange people, physicists, " he said as soon as they were outside again. "In my experience the ones who aren't actually dead are in some way very ill. -- Douglas Adams
This is all very wonderful," said Fenchurch a few days later, "but I do need to know what has happened to me. You see, there's this difference between us. That you lost something and found it again, and I found something and lost it. I need to find it again. -- Douglas Adams
I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously. -- Douglas Adams
Why can't people just learn to live together in peace and harmony?" said Arthur. Ford gave a loud, very hollow laugh. "Forty-two!" he said with a malicious grin. "No, doesn't work. Never mind. -- Douglas Adams
Here's an interesting little notion. Did you realize that most people's lives are governed by telephone numbers? -- Douglas Adams
Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs. -- Douglas Adams
God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. -- Douglas Adams
If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there? -- Douglas Adams
For instance, he would often gate-crash university parties, get badly drunk and start making fun of any astrophysicists he could find till he got thrown out. -- Douglas Adams
He turned left, therefore, in the hope of finding better fortune in that direction, but after a while lost his nerve and turned a speculative right, and then chanced another exploratory left, and after a few more such maneuvers was thoroughly lost. -- Douglas Adams
I live in what are known as hopes. I hope for fascinating and remunerative cases, my secretary hopes that I will pay her, her landlord hopes that she will produce some rent, the Electricity Board hopes that he will settle their bill, and so on. I find it a wonderfully optimistic way of life. -- Douglas Adams
He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and he would rather have had a chaperon. -- Douglas Adams
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
I've never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I've seen a few and they're never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you're in the right frame of mind, which is usually around lunchtime. -- Douglas Adams
Evolution? they said to themselves, Who needs it?, -- Douglas Adams
Monkey. I went along for the ride because I'd got some very safe money on him not doing it, and didn't want him coming back with fake evidence. -- Douglas Adams
Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They're solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive. -- Douglas Adams
Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy. -- Douglas Adams
I suppose you'll want to see the aliens now," he said. "Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust, or just fall apart where I'm standing? -- Douglas Adams
That sounds perfectly reasonable ... he said in a reassuring tone of voice, wondering who he was trying to reassure. -- Douglas Adams
[..] the actual building was old and dilapidated and remained standing more out of habit than from any inherent structural integrity [..] -- Douglas Adams
We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head. -- Douglas Adams
glared an upset glare -- Douglas Adams
And do we also have, do we have ... a party of minor deities from the Halls of Asgard? Away to his right came a rumble of thunder. Lightning arced across the stage. A small group of hairy men with helmets sat looking very pleased with themselves, and raised their glasses to him. -- Douglas Adams
He didn't look like an old hippie. Of course, you never could tell. His own elder brother had once spent a couple of years living in a Druidic commune, eating LSD doughnuts, and thinking he was a tree, since when he had gone on to become a director of a merchant bank. -- Douglas Adams
One of the things Ford Perfect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you've fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? -- Douglas Adams
The normal background-noise type of guilt that comes from just being alive this far into the twentieth century, -- Douglas Adams
conventional photon drive. -- Douglas Adams
Five wild Event Maelstroms swirled in vicious storms of unreason and spewed up a pavement. -- Douglas Adams
Laser light flickered all over him as if he was a packet of biscuits at a super-market check-out. -- Douglas Adams
Well, let us say inexplicable. There is no point in using the word "impossible" to describe something that has clearly happened. But it cannot be explained by anything we know. -- Douglas Adams
A five-week sand blizzard?" said Deep Thought haughtily. "You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff. -- Douglas Adams
Arthur Dent: What happens if I press this button?
Ford Prefect: I wouldn't-
Arthur Dent: Oh.
Ford Prefect: What happened?
Arthur Dent: A sign lit up, saying 'Please do not press this button again. -- Douglas Adams
But can we trust him?" he said. "Myself I'd trust him to the end of the Earth," said Ford. -- Douglas Adams
Same as you, Arthur. I hitched a ride. After all, with a degree in maths and another in astrophysics it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday. Sorry I missed the Wednesday lunch date, but I was in a black hole all morning. -- Douglas Adams
Time," said Arthur weakly, "is not currently one of my problems. -- Douglas Adams
Hey, er ... " said Zaphod, "what's your name?"
The man looked at them doubtfully.
"I don't know. Why, do you think I should have one? It seems very odd to
give a bundle of vague sensory perceptions a name. -- Douglas Adams
Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day." "And are you?" "No. That's where it all falls down, of course. -- Douglas Adams
Anything invented before your fifteenth birthday is the order of nature. That's how it should be. Anything invented between your th and th birthday is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited. -- Douglas Adams
Don't blame you, said Marvin and counted five hundred and ninety-seven thousand million sheep before falling asleep again a second later. -- Douglas Adams
He giggled and sniggered. He would have laughed out loud but he didn't have the room. -- Douglas Adams
Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto about? -- Douglas Adams
What, are you, crazy?' 'It's a possibility I haven't ruled out yet', said Zaphod quietly. 'I know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good. -- Douglas Adams
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. -- 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
Look, don't you understand?" shouted Arthur. He pointed at Prosser. "That man wants to knock my house down!" Ford glanced at him, puzzled. "Well he can do it while you're away, can't he?" he asked. "But I don't want him to!" "Ah. -- Douglas Adams
I don't believe there's a horse in your bathroom. -- Douglas Adams
he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. -- Douglas Adams
He continued: I should warn you that the chamber we are about to pass into does not literally exist within our planet. It is a little too ... large. We are about to pass through a gateway into a vast tract of hyperspace. It may disturb you. -- Douglas Adams
If God allows proof that he exists he robs people of faith and without faith what is God? Nothing. -- Douglas Adams
You see, if I keep it up I can eventually get promoted to Senior Shouting Officer, and there aren't usually many vacancies for nonshouting and nonpushing-people-about officers, so I think I'd better stick to what I know. -- Douglas Adams
I think this ship's brand new," said Ford. "How can you tell?" asked Arthur. "Have you got some exotic device for measuring the age of metal?" "No, I just found this sales brochure lying on floor -- Douglas Adams
It all sounds rather naive 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 ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. -- Douglas Adams
It was his subconscious which told him this
that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing. -- Douglas Adams
One of the officials of the party had irritably decided that the President was clearly not in a mood to read the deliciously turned speech that had been written for him, and had flipped the switch on the remote-control device in his pocket. -- Douglas Adams
If we see you smoking we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate action. -- Douglas Adams
The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no difference. Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are. -- Douglas Adams
Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth. -- Douglas Adams
Who should play the lead role in a film about me? Dunno. Danny De Vito? Jeff Goldblum? Meryl Streep? Someone of that kind. -- Douglas Adams
I didn't notice I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals. -- Douglas Adams
He should have known it was all wrong the moment they started hanging grand pianos over the sea-monster pool in the atrium. -- Douglas Adams
Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen ... -- Douglas Adams
Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. -- Douglas Adams
Years and years ago, I did a game based on 'Hitchhiker's Guide' with a company called Infocom, which was a great company. They were doing witty, intelligent, literate games based on text. -- Douglas Adams
I don't want to die now!" he yelled. "I've still got a headache! I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it! -- Douglas Adams
All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that. -- Douglas Adams
I've never met all these people you speak of. And neither, I suspect, have you. They only exist in words we hear. It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their eyes and ears. -- Douglas Adams
First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII - and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure. -- Douglas Adams
The truth of the matter is, that most English people don't know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about hot stimulants. -- Douglas Adams
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. -- Douglas Adams
Only six people in the entire Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a fait accompli: he was ideal presidency fodder.* -- Douglas Adams
The life cycle of ratchet screwdriver fruit is quite interesting. -- Douglas Adams
You see, Earthman, they really are particularly clever hyper-intelligent pandimensional beings. Your planet and people have formed the matrix of an organic computer running a ten-million-year research program ... . Let me tell you the whole story. It'll take a little time. -- Douglas Adams
Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp. -- Douglas Adams
the only thing that really gets hurt when you try and change time is yourself. -- Douglas Adams
And wow! Hey! What's this thing coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding word like ... ow ... ound ... round ... ground! That's it! That's a good name - ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me? -- Douglas Adams
Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner. -- Douglas Adams
doing with the puzzled -- Douglas Adams
I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end". -- 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
What did you say, Arthur?"
"I said, how the hell did you get here?"
"I was a row of dots flowing randomly through the Universe. Have you met Thor? He makes thunder."
"Hello," said Arthur. "I expect that must be very interesting."
"Hi," said Thor, "it is. -- Douglas Adams
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
He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left. -- Douglas Adams
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
What's that?" he yelped. "Don't worry," said Ford, "they haven't started yet." "Thank God for that," said Arthur, and relaxed. "It's probably just your house being knocked down, -- Douglas Adams
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
These muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had to try and unravel once time trouble was discovered and battles started pre-erupting hundred of years before the issues even arose. -- Douglas Adams
I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn't anything going on on the outside! -- Douglas Adams
I love deadlines," he said once. "I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.") He died in May 2001 - too young. His -- Douglas Adams
Hundreds of people who've never written before send in 'Dr. Who' scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is. -- Douglas Adams
If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves. -- Douglas Adams
He wondered if it was safe to grin. Very slowly and carefully, he grinned. It was safe. -- Douglas Adams
Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And -- Douglas Adams
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin -- Douglas Adams
They wrapped themselves in animal skins and furs which Ford Prefect acquired by a technique he once learned from a couple of ex-Pralite monks running a mind-surfing resort in the Hills of Hunian. -- Douglas Adams
But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving -- Douglas Adams
Ah," said Arthur, "er ... " He had an odd feeling of being like a man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman's husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks about the weather and leaves again. -- Douglas Adams
And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before
and thus was the Empire forged. -- 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
Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.
(Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.) -- Douglas Adams
For as long as he could remember, he'd suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there. -- Douglas Adams
One of those nasty hushes had descended on the place, a sort of missile crisis sort of hush. Even -- Douglas Adams
You can't dodge your responsibilities by saying they don't exist! -- Douglas Adams
An automatic system," he said and gave a small sigh. "Ancient computers ranged in the bowels of the planet tick away the dark millennia, and the ages hang heavy on their dusty data banks. I think they take the occasional potshot to relieve the monotony. -- 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
The Hitch Hiker's Guide has not been an opera. It has however been a tapestry, if you count a woven bath towel as a tapestry. -- Douglas Adams
Then who is it?" said Arthur. "Well," said Ford, "if we're lucky it's just the Vogons come to throw us in to space." "And if we're unlucky?" "If we're unlucky," said Ford grimly, "the captain might be serious in his threat that he's going to read us some of his poetry first ... . -- Douglas Adams
How many roads must a man walk down? -- Douglas Adams
A cup of tea would restore my normality.
[Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Screenplay] -- Douglas Adams
Trillian did a little research in the ship's copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness.
"Go to it," it said, "and good luck. -- Douglas Adams
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. -- Douglas Adams
Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? -- Douglas Adams
Don't pretend you want to talk to me, I know you hate me." "No, I don't." "Yes, you do, everybody does. It's part of the shape of the Universe. I only have to talk to somebody and they begin to hate me. Even robots hate me. If you just ignore me I expect I shall probably go away. -- 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
Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe. -- Douglas Adams
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
What was the self-sacrifice?" I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes." Why was that self-sacrifice?" Because they were mine!" said Ford, crossly. I think we have different value systems." Well mine's better. -- Douglas Adams
[..] when we get down to the subatomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that whenever we do find something it turns out not to actually something, but only the probability that there may something there. -- Douglas Adams
The future of computer power is pure simplicity. -- Douglas Adams
I'm afraid you cannot leave,' said Zarniwoop, 'you are entwined in the Improbability Field. You cannot escape.' He smiled the smile that Zaphod had wanted to hit and this time Zaphod hit it. -- Douglas Adams
I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no he'd come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me. -- 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
I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be. -- Douglas Adams
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. -- Douglas Adams
Sir,' I said to the universe, 'I exist.' 'That,' said the universe, 'creates no sense of obligation in me whatsoever. -- Douglas Adams
The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making. -- Douglas Adams
Yeah, could you just sort of keep this robot with you and guard this end of the passageway. Okay?" "Guard?" said Arthur. "What from? You just said there's no one here." "Yeah, well, just for safety, okay?" said Zaphod. "Whose? Yours or mine? -- Douglas Adams
Very deep. You should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you. -- Douglas Adams
Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now. -- 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
Arthur and Trillian had the fixed expressions of rabbits on a night road who think that the best way of dealing with approaching headlights is to stare them out. Zaphod -- Douglas Adams
But unless we determine to take action,' said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, 'then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care about that?' 'Not enough to want to get killed over it,' said Ford. -- Douglas Adams
Ford stared at Arthur, and Arthur was astonished to find his will beginning to weaken. He didn't realize that this was because of an old drinking game that Ford learned to play in the hyper-space ports that served the madranite mining belts in the star system of Orion Beta. -- Douglas Adams
It was the product of a mind that was not merely twisted, but actually sprained. -- Douglas Adams
No. No games. He wanted her and didn't care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her. -- Douglas Adams
You come to me for advice, but you can't cope with anything you don't recognize. Hmmm. So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh Well, business as usual , I suppose. -- Douglas Adams
You're crazy, Zaphod," he was saying, "Magrathea is a myth, a fairy story, it's what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to become economists, -- Douglas Adams
In an infinite Universe anything can happen. -- Douglas Adams
Patterns that Arthur knew, rough blobby shapes that were as familiar to him as the shapes of words, part of the furniture of his mind. For a few seconds he sat in stunned silence as the images rushed around his mind and tried to find somewhere to settle down and make sense ... -- Douglas Adams
So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe that 35 percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down. -- Douglas Adams
Perhaps I'm old and tired, 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. -- Douglas Adams
Out, he said. People who can supply that amount of firepower don't need to supply verbs as well. Ford and Arthur went out, closely followed by the wrong end of the Kill-O-Zap gun and the buttons. Turning -- Douglas Adams
The only place they registered at all was on a small black device called a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic which winked away quietly to itself. It nestled in the darkness inside a leather satchel which Ford Prefect habitually wore slung around his neck. -- Douglas Adams
He had extracted himself from the Cambridge one-way system by the usual method, which involved going round and round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort of escape velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction, which he was now trying to identify and correct for. -- Douglas Adams
ART: None. The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn't a mirror big enough - see point one. -- Douglas Adams
Shee, you guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off. -- 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
The whole Poghril tribe had died out from famine except for one last man who died of cholesterol poisoning some weeks later. -- Douglas Adams
We're going,' he said excitedly, and shivered with energy. 'Where? How?' said Arthur. 'I don't know,' said Ford, 'but I just feel that the time is right. Things are going to happen. We're on our way.' He lowered his voice to a whisper. 'I have detected,' he said, 'disturbances in the wash.' He -- Douglas Adams
Sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away. -- Douglas Adams
One is never alone with a rubber duck. -- Douglas Adams
Gilks sighed. 'You're a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that,' he said, 'but you make the same
mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid. -- Douglas Adams
Why' is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it.
The alphabet does not go 'A B C D What? When? How?' but it does go 'V W X Why? Z. -- Douglas Adams
R is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental wellbeing and not being more than say five minutes late. It -- Douglas Adams
I think it's even worse when you're in a situation where the object of your desire is being nice to you and liking you, but that's not enough, they've got to hate you or love you; anything in between is really upsetting and Arthur finds that very, very difficult. And -- Douglas Adams
The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?" "It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere on the table, "without undergoing a prefrontal lobotomy. -- Douglas Adams
I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. -- Douglas Adams
I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer ... -- Douglas Adams
Dirk was, for one of the few times in a life of exuberantly prolific loquacity, wordless. -- Douglas Adams
And that is what Mauritius is most famous for: the extinction of the dodo. -- Douglas Adams
There was something very slightly odd about him, but it was difficult to say what it was. -- 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
Looked as if the various parts of its more or less humanoid body didn't quite fit properly. -- Douglas Adams
He didn't know why he had become president of the galaxy, except that it seemed a fun thing to be. -- Douglas Adams
Marvin the Paranoid Android -- 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
A nerd is someone who uses a telephone to talk to other people about telephones. -- Douglas Adams
Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this
partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties. -- 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
We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual. -- Douglas Adams
If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. -- Douglas Adams
My name is not important, -- Douglas Adams
Ever since Newton, we've done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we're now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication. -- Douglas Adams
It hadn't properly registered yet with Arthur that the council wanted to knock it down and build a bypass instead. -- Douglas Adams
Ah, shit," he said, "you wake me up from my own perfectly good dream to show me somebody else's." He -- Douglas Adams
There's mud on the floor, cigarettes and whisky on the table, fish on a plate for you and a memory of them in my mind. Hardly conclusive evidence I know, but then all evidence is circumstantial. -- Douglas Adams
They were each grateful to retire to separate cabins and try to rationalize their thoughts. -- Douglas Adams
You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot. -- Douglas Adams
Try and make yourself comfortable on the sofa," invited Reg, fussing around hospitably. "I don't know if you'll manage it. It always feels to me as if it's been stuffed with cabbage leaves and cutlery. -- Douglas Adams
The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. -- Douglas Adams
The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago,' continued Marvin. -- Douglas Adams
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infrared, How I hate the night. Now I lay me down to sleep, Try to count electric sheep, Sweet dream wishes you can keep, How I hate the night. -Marvin -- Douglas Adams
People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of 'Hitchhiker's,' and I thought, 'No, no.' I didn't want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I'd already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in. -- Douglas Adams
(who was arguing with a spokesman for the bulldozer drivers about whether or not Arthur Dent constituted a mental health hazard, and how much they should get paid if he did) -- Douglas Adams
The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub-meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around -- Douglas Adams
A monstrous, grisly light poured in on them. - a hideous light - a boiling, pestilential light - a light that would have disfigured hell. The -- Douglas Adams
Reality is frequently inaccurate. -- Douglas Adams
Stotting is jumping upward with all four legs simultaneously. My advice: do not die until you've seen a large black poodle stotting in the snow. -- Douglas Adams
The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in the destruction of the planet Earth. -- Douglas Adams
But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, -- Douglas Adams
It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass. -- Douglas Adams
It deals with that most terrible and harrowing experience in life - trying to remember an address which somebody told you but you didn't write down. -- Douglas Adams
The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armor to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place. -- Douglas Adams
This man is the bee's knees, Arthur, he is the wasp's nipples. He is, I would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous zones of every major flying insect of the Western world. -- Douglas Adams
Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason [Zaphood] had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did. -- Douglas Adams
It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know? -- Douglas Adams
He suddenly remembered the tape he had taken from Susan's answering machine, and hoped to God there wasn't anything more important in Gordon's message than ravings about rabbits. -- Douglas Adams
The moment at which two people, approaching from opposite ends of a long passageway, recognize each other and immediately pretend they haven t. This is to avoid the ghastly embarrassment of having to continue recognizing each other the whole length of the corridor. -- Douglas Adams
Zaphod had never heard of this. He believed that he had heard of all the fun things in the Galaxy, so he assumed that the Total Perspective Vortex was not fun. -- Douglas Adams
Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet. -- Douglas Adams
One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us.' -- Douglas Adams
A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach, and drifted back to the sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea. -- Douglas Adams
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. -- Douglas Adams
Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girl that I'm not married to. -- Douglas Adams
What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"
"Six by nine. Forty two."
"That's it. That's all there is."
"I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe -- Douglas Adams
That is the first thing anybody has said to me for seventeen years, three months and two days, five hours, nineteen minutes and twenty seconds. I've been counting." He -- Douglas Adams
We all like to congregate at boundary conditions. Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where bodies meet mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other. -- Douglas Adams
Great book stands the test of time unlike my good self ... -- Douglas Adams
On the delivery plate of the Nutri-Matic Drink Synthesizer was a small tray, on which say three bone china cups and saucers, a bone china jug of milk, a silver teapot full of the best tea Arthur had ever tasted and a small printed note saying Wait. -- Douglas Adams
They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost immediately. -- 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
She shook her head in puzzlement.
'You're very strange,' she said.
'No, I'm very ordinary,' said Arthur,'but some very strange things have happened to me. You could say I'm more differed from than differing. -- Douglas Adams
The Hollywood process is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it. -- Douglas Adams
There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. -- Douglas Adams
Is that robot yours?" he said. "No," came a thin metallic voice from the crater, "I'm mine. -- Douglas Adams
I don't go around gratuitously shooting people and then bragging about it afterward in seedy space-rangers bars, like some cops I could mention! I go around shooting people gratuitously and then I agonize about it afterward for hours to my girlfriend! -- Douglas Adams
The President of the Universe holds no real power. His sole purpose is to take attention away from where the power truly exists ... -- Douglas Adams
The Electric Monk's day was going tremendously well and he broke into an excited gallop. That is to say that, excitedly, he spurred his horse to a gallop and, unexcitedly, his horse broke into it. -- Douglas Adams
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen. -- Douglas Adams
With a microsecond pause, and a finely calculated micromodulation of pitch and timbre - nothing you could actually take offense at - Marvin managed to convey his utter contempt and horror of all things human. -- Douglas Adams
And if you want to pop off for a quick one yourself later on," said Ford, "we can always cover for you in return. -- Douglas Adams
It seemed to me,' said Wonko the Sane, 'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane. -- Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently is the name under which I now trade. There are certain events in the past, I'm afraid, from which I would wish to disassociate myself."
"Absolutely, I know how you feel. Most of the fourteenth century, for instance, was pretty grim," agreed Reg earnestly. -- Douglas Adams
I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say. -- Douglas Adams
I remember very little about writing the first series of 'Hitchhiker's.' It's almost as if someone else wrote it. -- Douglas Adams
he found the idea of someone who was not only privileged, but was also sorry for himself because he thought the world didn't really understand the problems of privileged people, deeply obnoxious. -- Douglas Adams
I was created to fulfill a function and I failed in it. I negated my own existence. -- Douglas Adams
A slight hiss built into a deafening roar of rushing air as the outer hatchway opened onto an empty blackness studded with tiny, impossibly bright points of light. Ford and Arthur popped into outer space like corks from a toy gun. -- Douglas Adams
Totally mad,' he said, 'utter nonsense. But we'll do it because it's brilliant nonsense. -- Douglas Adams
Her remark would have commanded greater attention had it been generally realized that human beings were only the third most intelligent life form present on the planet Earth, -- Douglas Adams
When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch. -- Douglas Adams
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair. -- Douglas Adams
Therefore we must be mad.' 'Nice day for it. -- Douglas Adams
Worked hard to blend himself into Earth society - with, -- Douglas Adams
Now the world has gone to bed,' Marvin droned, 'Darkness won't engulf my head, 'I can see by infra-red, 'How I hate the night.' He -- Douglas Adams
Even the evil-looking bird perched on a rod in the bar had stopped screeching out the names and addresses of local contract killers, which was a service it provided for free. -- Douglas Adams
Can't stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I'll tell them what to do. Don't get bitten in the first place. (quoting Dr. Struan Sutherland) -- Douglas Adams
All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others. -- Douglas Adams
The Universe, the whole infinite Universe. The infinite suns, the infinite distances between them, and yourself an invisible dot on an invisible dot, infinitely small. -- Douglas Adams
Gordon Way's astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing compared to his astonishment at what happened next. -- Douglas Adams
If there was one thing life had taught her it was that there are times when you do not go back for your bag and times when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the two types of occasion. -- Douglas Adams
He came for a moment perilously close to believing that he could fly, but a quick-thinking error-checking protocol cut in and told him not to be so silly. It -- Douglas Adams
Because Ford never learned to say his original name, his father eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy. -- Douglas Adams
The gorillas are not yet sufficiently advanced in evolutionary terms to have discovered the benefits of passports, currency-declaration forms, and official bribery, and therefore tend to wander backward and forward across the border as and when their beastly, primitive whim takes them. -- Douglas Adams
Earth: mostly harmless -- Douglas Adams
Assumptions are the things we don't know we're making. -- Douglas Adams
Albacete (AL-ba-seet) n. A single surprisingly long hair growing in the middle of nowhere. -- Douglas Adams
Ballycumber (ba-li-KUM-ber) n.
One of the six half-read books lying somewhere in your bed. -- Douglas Adams
The mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. -- Douglas Adams
I have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don't believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view. -- Douglas Adams
The bits which did mean anything were often so wonderfully buried that no one could ever spot them slipping past in the avalanche of nonsense. -- Douglas Adams
Their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do. -- Douglas Adams
I wanted to be John Cleese. It took me some time to realise that the job was taken. -- Douglas Adams
It's very simple," said Ford, "my client, Mr. Dent, says that he will stop lying here in the mud on the sole condition that you come and take over from him. -- Douglas Adams
It's reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is woking. -- Douglas Adams
He let the curtain drop and the terrible light that had played on his features went off to play somewhere more healthy. -- Douglas Adams
The average Vogon will not think twice before doing something so pointlessly hideous to you that you will wish you had never been born - or (if you are a clearer minded thinker) that the Vogon had never been born. -- Douglas Adams
It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too. -- Douglas Adams
The difference between us and a computer is that, the computer is blindingly stupid, but it is capable of being stupid many, many million times a second. -- Douglas Adams
I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous. -- Douglas Adams
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be. -- Douglas Adams
I'm convinced that Bach is the greatest genius who ever walked among us, and the Brandenburgs are what he wrote when he was happy. -- Douglas Adams
At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing. -- Douglas Adams
I have always been absurdly, ridiculously tall. To give you an idea- when we went on school trips to Interesting and Improving Places, the form-master wouldn't say "Meet under the clock tower," or "Meet under the War Memorial," but "Meet under Adams. -- Douglas Adams
Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day. -- Douglas Adams
Ford had another Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the drink which has been described as the alcoholic equivalent of a mugging - expensive and bad for the head. -- Douglas Adams
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick. -- Douglas Adams
He gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to gargle while fighting off a pack of wolves. -- Douglas Adams
Howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl slurrp uuuurgh should have a good time. Message repeats. -- Douglas Adams
Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes our ends. -- Douglas Adams
Ford even began to whistle, which was probably his mistake. Nobody likes a whistler, -- Douglas Adams
Eight hours West sat a man alone on a beach mourning an inexplicable loss. He could only think of his loss in little packets of grief at a time, because the whole thing was too great to be borne. -- Douglas Adams
Let us be dreamers, thinkers, speculative philosophers, or as our spouses would have it: Idiots -- Douglas Adams
Little green person, my stomach could take you home and cuddle you all night for the mere idea. -- Douglas Adams
NO ADMITTANCE.
NOT EVEN TO AUTHORISED PERSONNEL.
YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.
GO AWAY. -- Douglas Adams
The old me knew. The old me cared. Fine, so far so good. Except that the old me cared so much that he actually got inside his own brain
my own brain
and locked off the bits that knew and cared, because if I knew and cared I wouldn't be able to do it. -- Douglas Adams
It must be said, some success. For instance, he had spent those fifteen years pretending to be an out-of-work actor, which was plausible enough. -- Douglas Adams
The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis. -- Douglas Adams
The only thing nicer than a phone that didn't ring all the time (or indeed at all) was six phones that didn't ring all the time (or indeed at all). -- Douglas Adams
Would you like to see the menu?" he said, "or would you like meet the Dish of the Day?"
...
"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body? -- Douglas Adams
I think media are at their most interesting before anybody's thought of calling them art, when people still think they're just a load of junk. -- Douglas Adams
Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause. -- Douglas Adams
Hey, kid, you just saved our lives, you know that?"
"Oh, well, it was nothing really ... "
"Was it? Oh well, forget it then -- Douglas Adams
The sky which had started out with such verve and spirit in the morning was beginning to lose its concentration and slip back into its normal English condition, that of a damp and rancid dish cloth. -- Douglas Adams
This fact may safely be made the subject of suspense since it is of no significance whatsoever. -- Douglas Adams
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
had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet. -- Douglas Adams
I love deadlines," he has said. "I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. -- Douglas Adams
Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch. -- Douglas Adams
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
He would insult the Universe. That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order. -- Douglas Adams
You certainly don't fuck about trying to ride manta rays. -- Douglas Adams
Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm. -- Douglas Adams
You can tune a guitar, but you can't tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass. -- Douglas Adams
The big corporations are suddenly taking notice of the web, and their reactions have been slow. Even the computer industry failed to see the importance of the Internet, but that's not saying much. Let's face it, the computer industry failed to see that the century would end. -- Douglas Adams
Flashed one of those grins of his which always made people think he'd been overdoing things recently and should try to get some rest. -- Douglas Adams
In my aircar," said the old man, motioning Arthur to get into the craft which had settled silently next to them. "We are going deep into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is being revived from its five-million-year slumber. -- 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
No private detective looks like a private detective. That's one of the first rules of private detection."
"But if no private detective looks like a private detective, how does a private detective know what it is he's supposed not to look like? Seems to me there's a problem there. -- Douglas Adams
He had been told that when looking for a good oracle, it was best to find the oracle that other oracles went to. -- Douglas Adams
The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79. -- Douglas Adams
Every single decision we make, every breath we draw, opens some doors and closes many others. Most of them we don't notice. Some we do. -- Douglas Adams
Even light, which travels so fast that it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars. -- Douglas Adams
The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel. -- Douglas Adams
What I need... is a strong drink and a peer group. -- Douglas Adams
Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious.
Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry. He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her.
"Why's this fish so bloody good?" he demanded, angrily. -- Douglas Adams
They plunged through heavy walls of sound, mountains of archaic thought, valleys of mood music, bad shoe sessions and footling bats and suddenly heard a girl's voice. -- Douglas Adams
A bit like a preying mantis that doesn't prey - a non-preying mantis if you like. -- Douglas Adams
When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates -- Douglas Adams
There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath. -- Douglas Adams
He was following the Earth through its days, drifting with the rhythms of its myriad pulses, seeping through the webs of its life, swelling with its tides, turning with its weight. -- Douglas Adams
In the stillness, a fly would not have dared clear it's throat. -- Douglas Adams
The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner', but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish. -- Douglas Adams
Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere. -- Douglas Adams
Hi there! This is Eddie, your shipboard computer, and I'm feeling just great, guys, and I know I'm just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me. -- Douglas Adams
Trouble with a long journey like this,' continued the Captain, 'is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you're going to say next. -- Douglas Adams
The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying 'And another thing ... ' twenty minutes after admitting he'd lost the argument. -- Douglas Adams
The history of "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is one of idealism, struggle, despair, passion, success, failure, and enormously long lunch-breaks. -- Douglas Adams
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer -- Douglas Adams
And so the problem remained; -- Douglas Adams
The waiter smiled a polite little waiter's smile. He had almost exhausted his polite little waiter repertoire and would soon be slipping into his role of a rather tight-lipped and sarcastic little waiter. -- Douglas Adams
This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays. -- Douglas Adams
That's right!" agreed Majikthise. "You'll have a national Philosophers' strike on your hands!" The -- Douglas Adams
Just as discretion was the better part of valor, so was cowardice the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in the closet. -- Douglas Adams
It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn't actually get you anywhere. -- Douglas Adams
All right," said Ford, "just stop panicking! -- Douglas Adams
I can see we're in for a fabulous evening's apocalypse. -- Douglas Adams
The two suns! It was like mountains of fire boiling into space. -- Douglas Adams
You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy's a fun place. You'll need to have this fish in your ear. -- Douglas Adams
Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it. -- Douglas Adams
He sniggered.
He didn't like to think of himself as the sort of person who giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now. -- Douglas Adams
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. -- Douglas Adams
And what's happened to the Earth?" "Ah. It's been demolished." "Has it," said Arthur levelly. "Yes. It just boiled away into space." "Look," said Arthur, "I'm a bit upset about that. -- Douglas Adams
Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colourless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms. -- Douglas Adams
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. -- Douglas Adams
Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. -- Douglas Adams
The fact is, I don't know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn't collapse when you beat your head against it. -- Douglas Adams
You have a time machine and you use it for ... watching television?"
"Well, I wouldn't use it at all if I could get the hang of the video recorder. -- Douglas Adams
Thousand seven hundred and nine to one against. By a totally staggering coincidence that is also the -- Douglas Adams
Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food. -- Douglas Adams
You're so unhip, it's a wonder your bum doesn't fall off. -- Douglas Adams
Will you stop counting!' snarled Zaphod.
'Yes,' said Ford Prefect, 'in three minutes and thirty-five seconds. -- Douglas Adams
They both sat on the pavement and watched with a certain unease as huge children bounced heavily along the sand and wild horses thundered through the sky taking fresh supplies of reinforced railings to the Uncertain Areas. -- 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
Mc Donalds he thought. There's no longer any such thing as a Mc Donalds hamburger. He passed out. When he came around seconds later he found he was sobbing for his mother. -- Douglas Adams
Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyways, so their opinion can and should be discounted. -- Douglas Adams
This was the very limit beyond which none of them had ever speculated, or even known that there was any speculation to be done. -- Douglas Adams
Zaphod was so surprised that they had to shoot him again before he fell down. -- 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
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. -- Douglas Adams
Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it. -- Douglas Adams
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! -- Douglas Adams
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. -- Douglas Adams
One of Zaphod's heads looked away. The other turned round to see what the first was looking at, but it wasn't looking at anything very much. -- Douglas Adams
Went back on to the bridge to watch over the tiny flashing lights and figures that charted the ship's progress through the void. -- Douglas Adams
Discovered it had an emergency back-up personality -- Douglas Adams
The difficulty with this conversation is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees. -- Douglas Adams
Being offended by things is the world's big hobby at the moment. It's almost taken over from wearing goatee beards. -- Douglas Adams
I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course
the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end. -- Douglas Adams
They soared with ease, basking in electromagnetic rays from the star Sol, biding their time, grouping, preparing. The planet beneath them was almost perfectly oblivious of their presence, which was just how they wanted it for the moment. -- Douglas Adams
They were aware that this day they would represent their entire race in its greatest moment, but they conducted themselves calmly and quietly as they seated themselves deferentially before the desk, -- Douglas Adams
One of the main problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. -- 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
The waiter approached.
'Would you like to see the menu?' he said. 'Or would you like to meet the Dish of the Day?'
'Huh?' said Ford.
'Huh?' said Arthur.
'Huh?' said Trillian.
'That's cool,' said Zaphod. 'We'll meet the meat. -- Douglas Adams
Arthur paused, warily. "You going to ask -- Douglas Adams
In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground. -- Douglas Adams
Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity - distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The -- Douglas Adams
The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. -- Douglas Adams
Ok," he said, "I don't like to disturb you at what I know must be a difficult and distressing time for you, but I need to know first of all if you actually realize that this is a difficult and distressing time for you. -- Douglas Adams
Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you. -- Douglas Adams
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place. -- Douglas Adams
This sentence is not true -- Douglas Adams
On a waiter's check pad," said Slartibartfast, "reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible, within certain parameters. -- Douglas Adams
It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always
appreciated. -- Douglas Adams
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. -- Douglas Adams
What's up?" [asked Ford.]
"I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there. -- Douglas Adams
He was a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose, and it did at least keep him on the move. -- Douglas Adams
The story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book -- Douglas Adams
The arkleseizure cometh! -- Douglas Adams
In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. -- Douglas Adams
It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo, we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed. -- Douglas Adams
But how are you, metalman?" said Ford. "Very depressed. -- Douglas Adams
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. -- Douglas Adams
If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion. -- Douglas Adams
Proving nothing," said Ford. "I wouldn't trust that computer to speak my weight."
"I can do that for you, sure," enthused the computer, punching out more ticker tape. "I can even work out your personality problems to ten decimal places if it will help. -- Douglas Adams
Are you trying to tell me," said Arthur, slowly and with control, "that you originally . . . made the Earth? -- Douglas Adams
A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment. -- 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
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? -- Douglas Adams
It's good to leave your room super-messy when you're away. Whoever tries to break into your room will thought it has already been ransacked. -- Douglas Adams
Did I do anything wrong today," he said, "or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice? -- 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
He had seen the whole Universe stretching to infinity around him - everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he was the most important thing in it. Having a conceited ego is one thing. Actually being told by a machine is another. -- Douglas Adams
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
The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit. -- Douglas Adams
This is not her story. But it is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences. -- Douglas Adams
Paranoid Android, -- Douglas Adams
He lay still and quiet. He absorbed the enveloping darkness, slowly relaxed his limbs from end to end, eased and regulated his breathing, gradually cleared his mind of all thought, closed his eyes, and was completely incapable of getting to sleep. -- Douglas Adams
You turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous amount of fun, actually, working on that. -- Douglas Adams
Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it. -- Douglas Adams
I'm sure we can come to some arrangement," said Ford. "Excuse me!" he shouted. -- Douglas Adams
Life, will be a very great deal less weird without you! -- Douglas Adams
I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. -- Douglas Adams
The man was awake but not glad to be. -- 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
He felt a tug of sadness that someone who had seemed so shiningly alive within the small confines of a university community should have seemed to fade so much in the light of common day. -- Douglas Adams
The recession came and we decided it would save a lot of bother if we just slept through it. So we programmed the computers to revive us when it was all over. -- Douglas Adams
Mark Carwardine's role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise. -- Douglas Adams
There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened. -- Douglas Adams
Wainwright's Fruit Emporium. Mr Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right in the head and thinks he is a cucumber. Thank you for calling. -- Douglas Adams
Ahenny (adj.) - The way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves. -- Douglas Adams
So, the world is fine. We don't have to save the world - the world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about, is whether or not the world we live in, will be capable of sustaining us in it. That's what we need to think about. -- Douglas Adams
2,000 years ago one man got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if everyone was nice to each other for a change. -- Douglas Adams
In so far as it is possible for a green blur to arch its eyebrows disdainfully, this is what the green blur now did. -- 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
This is flight 121 to Los Angeles. If your travel plans today do not include Los Angeles, now would be the perfect time to disembark. -- Douglas Adams
Infinity minus one," chattered the computer. "Improbability sum now complete. -- Douglas Adams
It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their own eyes and ears. -- Douglas Adams
Odd," agreed Reg. "I've certainly never come across any irreversible mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field. -- Douglas Adams
He learned to communicate with birds and discovered their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with windspeed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries. -- Douglas Adams
Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out rather than thinking of something new to put in. -- Douglas Adams
Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn't him. -- Douglas Adams
When Arthur had been a boy at school, long before the Earth had been demolished, he had used to play football. He had not been at all good at it, and his particular speciality had been scoring own goals in important matches. -- Douglas Adams
A quick change of magnification brought them into close focus - two massively real rockets thundering through the sky. The suddenness of it was shocking. -- Douglas Adams
Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying Blood ... blood ... blood ... blood ... -- Douglas Adams
Arthur shook his head and sat down. He looked up.
"I thought you must be dead ... " he said simply.
"So did I for a while," said Ford, "and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic. -- Douglas Adams
Research. Government archives. Detective work. Few lucky guesses. Easy. -- Douglas Adams
Arthur didn't notice that the men were running from the bulldozers; he didn't notice that Mr Prosser was staring hectically into the sky. What Mr Prosser had noticed was that huge yellow somethings were screaming through the cluds, impossibly huge somethings. -- Douglas Adams
Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. -- Douglas Adams
The light works," he said, indicating the window, "the gravity works," he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. "Anything else we have to take our chances with. -- Douglas Adams
Look, why don't you sit yourself down over there and let me plug you in?" He gestured Arthur toward a chair which looked as if it had been made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus. "It was made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus," explained the old man -- Douglas Adams
What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong! -- Douglas Adams
I searched my soul, and discovered that there was nothing anywhere in my upbringing, experience, or even primal instincts to tell me how to react to someone who has quite simply, calmly, sitting right there in front of me, stolen one of my biscuits. -- Douglas Adams
And the renewed shock had nearly made him spill his drink. He drained it quickly before anything serious happened to it. He then had another quick one to follow the first one down and check that it was all right. -- 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
Magrathea itself disappeared and its memory soon passed into the obscurity of legend. In these enlightened days, of course, no one believes a word of -- Douglas Adams
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands. -- Douglas Adams
Now - either you all give yourselves up now and let us beat you up a bit, though not very much of course because we are firmly opposed to needless violence, or we blow up this entire planet and possibly one or two others we noticed on our way out here! -- 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
He wasn't certain whether he had just got space-sickness or religion. -- Douglas Adams
Alltami (n.)
The ancient art of being able to balance the hot and cold shower taps. -- Douglas Adams
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
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
I read of one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole. Killed ten billion people. -- Douglas Adams
The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as 'Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With'. -- Douglas Adams
Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through. -- Douglas Adams
The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, thought you know that it probably will not be. -- Douglas Adams
Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity - distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless -- Douglas Adams
The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. -- Douglas Adams
They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked 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 he continual wrenching of experience. -- Douglas Adams
When we told our guide that we didn't want to go to all the tourist places he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don't want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists. -- Douglas Adams
Had a memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly, in that it was colorful, flitted prettily hither and thither, and was -- Douglas Adams
They discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying. -- Douglas Adams
But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months. -- Douglas Adams
So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed.
The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.
Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy. -- Douglas Adams
He was also firmly and utterly opposed to all and any forms of cruelty to any animals whatsoever except geese. -- Douglas Adams
Thereafter, staggering semiparalytic down the night streets, he would often ask passing policemen if they knew the way to Betelgeuse. -- Douglas Adams
I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it. -- 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
Something was moving quietly through the ionosphere many miles above the surface of the planet; several somethings in fact, -- Douglas Adams
I taught myself to play the guitar by listening to Paul Simon records, working it out note by note. He is an incredibly intelligent musician. He's not someone who has a natural outpouring of melody like McCartney or Dylan, who are just terribly prolific with musical ideas. -- Douglas Adams
If you'd call it a robot," muttered Arthur. "It's more a sort of electronic sulking machine. -- 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
Ford Shouted out, Hey listen! I think we've got enough problems of our own having you shooting at us, so if you could avoid laying your problems on us as well, I think we'd all find it easier to cope -- Douglas Adams
Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of each division of your company. -- Douglas Adams
There is no problem so complicated that you can't find a very simple answer to it if you look at it right. -- 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
What god would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15:37 flight to Oslo? -- Douglas Adams
I come in peace...Take me to your lizard. -- Douglas Adams
He gestured Arthur toward a chair which looked as if it had been made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus. "It was made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus, -- Douglas Adams
It's part of the shape of the Universe. I only have to talk to somebody and they begin to hate me. -- Douglas Adams
Nevertheless, like every parking lot in the Galaxy throughout the entire history of parking lots, this parking lot smelled predominantly of impatience. -- Douglas Adams
In cases of major discrepancy its always reality thats got it wrong ... reality is frequently inaccurate. -- Douglas Adams
Reality is hopelessly inaccurate. -- Douglas Adams
The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate. -- Douglas Adams
And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on. -- 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
Abilene (AB-a-lene) adj. Descriptive of the pleasing coolness on the reverse side of the pillow. -- Douglas Adams
Siamese Cats have a way of staring at you. Those who have walked in on the Queen cleaning her teeth will know the expression. -- Douglas Adams
Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you. -- Douglas Adams
He dreamed at one point in his slumbers of New York. In his dream he was walking late at night along the East Side, beside the river which had become so extravagantly polluted that new lifeforms were now emerging from it spontaneously, demanding welfare and voting rights. -- Douglas Adams
Time affords us the ability to blame past errors on others while whole heartedly pronouncing our futures successes. -- Douglas Adams
Predicting the future is a mug's game, but any game is improved when you can actually keep the score. -- Douglas Adams
The ship did. All by itself." "Huh?" "While we were in Improbability Drive." "But that's incredible." "No, Zaphod. Just very very improbable. -- Douglas Adams
He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it. -- Douglas Adams
Outside the door were the clear sounds of marching footsteps. -- Douglas Adams
Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don't quite work yet is just not worth the effort for end users, however much fun it is for nerds like us. -- Douglas Adams
Anything that happens, happens. -- Douglas Adams
Charming man," he said. "I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one ... -- Douglas Adams
Please relax," said the voice pleasantly, like a stewardess in an airliner with only one wing and two engines one of which is on fire, "you are perfectly safe. -- Douglas Adams
Some say that the universe is made so that when we are about to understand it it changes into something even more incomprehensible. And then there are those who say that this has already happened. -- Douglas Adams
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
The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen is that it won't. That is not what "accident" means. -- Douglas Adams
The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose complaints department now covers all the major landmasses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system. Arthur -- Douglas Adams
When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty. -- Douglas Adams
I'm up to here with cool, okay? I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis. -- Douglas Adams
A theory of the universe that states: If anyone finds out what the universe is for, it will disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable. -- Douglas Adams
He felt like an old sponge steeped in paraffin and left in the sun to dry. -- Douglas Adams
Plenty of people did not care for him much, but then there is a huge difference between disliking somebody - maybe even disliking them a lot - and actually shooting them, strangling them, dragging them through the fields and setting their house on fire. -- Douglas Adams
You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool. -- Douglas Adams
That is really amazing.' he said. 'That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing I think I'd like to steal it. -- Douglas Adams
A Hooloovoo is a super-intelligent shade of the color blue. -- Douglas Adams
Vell, Zaphod's just zis guy, you know? -- Douglas Adams
Perhaps I would like a glass of whisky. Yes, that seems more likely. -- Douglas Adams
Assumptions are what we don't know we are making -- Douglas Adams
Who said anything about panicking?' snapped Arthur. 'This is still just the culture shock. You wait till I've settled down into the situation and found my bearings. Then I'll start panicking! -- 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
Life ... is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast. -- Douglas Adams
But that's incredible." "No, Zaphod. Just very very improbable." "Er, yeah. -- Douglas Adams
Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn't like it, it is it. -- Douglas Adams
If I ever meet myself,' said Zaphod, 'I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me. -- Douglas Adams
His eyes passed over the solid shapes of the instruments and computers that lined the bridge. They winked away innocently at him. He stared out at the stars, but none of them said a word. -- Douglas Adams
Funny, how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does. -- Douglas Adams
There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.' -- Douglas Adams
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. -- Douglas Adams
A fresh breeze danced lightly through the trees, and the odd sensation that all the buildings were quietly humming -- Douglas Adams
Oh, er, well the hatchway in front of us will open in a few moments and we will shoot out into deep space I expect and asphyxiate. If you take a lungful of air with you you can last for up to thirty seconds, of course. -- Douglas Adams
The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks. -- Douglas Adams
Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job. -- Douglas Adams
There is another theory that states: This has already happened ... -- Douglas Adams
Marvin flashed her an electronic look. -- Douglas Adams
The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is ... 42! -- Douglas Adams
He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is. -- Douglas Adams
I think that growing up in a crowded continent like Europe with an awful lot of competing claims, ideas ... cultures ... and systems of thought, we have, perforce, developed a more sophisticated notion of what the word 'freedom' means than I see much evidence of in America. -- Douglas Adams
What's that, forgone conclusion then you reckon, sir?' said the barman. 'Arsenal without a chance?'
'No, no,' said Ford, 'it's just that the world's about to end. -- Douglas Adams
Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means. -- Douglas Adams
Looked excitingly purposeful, with large video screens ranged over the control and guidance system panels on the concave wall, and long banks of computers set into the convex wall. In one corner a robot sat humped, -- Douglas Adams
Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was.
"Is there any tea on this spaceship?" he asked. -- Douglas Adams
...illegal states of mind... -- Douglas Adams
Space is really big-REALLY big. -- Douglas Adams
In the winter time the temperature falls well below the legal minimum. -- Douglas Adams
I used to be a great fan of doing crosswords. When you're fiddling around with anagrams, you get wonderful jumbles of syllables that become interesting. -- Douglas Adams
He was clearly a man of many qualities, even if they were mostly bad ones. -- Douglas Adams
I sat in a spluttering, bleeding heap protesting that I was fine and all I needed was a quiet corner to go and die in and everything would be all right. -- Douglas Adams
Live and learn. At any rate, you live. -- Douglas Adams
What are you after?"
...
"Well," said Zaphod airily, "It's partly the curiosity, partly a sense of adventure, but mostly I think it's the fame and the money ... -- Douglas Adams
thus was the Empire forged. -- Douglas Adams
If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now. -- Douglas Adams
I am terribly proud of-I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA! -- 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
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. -- Douglas Adams
We only ever had the one sun at home," persevered Arthur. "I came from a planet called Earth, you know." "I know," said Marvin, "you keep going on about it. It sounds awful. -- Douglas Adams
Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. -- Douglas Adams
Share & enjoy life, the universe & everything -- 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
People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around. -- Douglas Adams
The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable. -- Douglas Adams
It's not so much an afterlife' Said Arthur, 'more a sort of apres vie -- Douglas Adams
They obstinately persisted in their absence -- Douglas Adams
Richard reflected that Dirk's was a face into which too much had already been put. What with that and the amount he talked, the traffic through his mouth was almost incessant. His ears, on the other hand, remained almost totally unused in normal conversation. -- Douglas Adams
He pressed the entry for the relevant page. The screen flashed and swirled and resolved into a page of print. Arthur stared at it. "It doesn't have an entry!" he burst out. -- Douglas Adams
Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to life again. -- Douglas Adams
Perhaps they are singing songs to you,' he said, 'and I just think they're asking me questions.' He paused again. Sometimes he would pause for days, just to see what it was like. -- Douglas Adams
DETCHANT (n.)
That part of a hymn (usually a few notes at the end of a verse) where the tune goes so high or low that you suddenly have to change octaves to accommodate it. -- Douglas Adams
Ford had his own code of ethics. It wasn't much of one, but it was his and he stuck by it, more or less. One rule he made was never to buy his own drinks. He -- 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
Will you open up the exit hatch, please, computer? -- Douglas Adams
It appeared then to be at least partially satisfied. Whereas before it had been a cross dodo, it was at least now a cross, fed dodo, which was probably about as much as it could hope for in this life. -- Douglas Adams
The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop! -- Douglas Adams
In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time and had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that wants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will lend it some. -- Douglas Adams
I don't know what I'm looking for."
"What not?"
"Because ... because ... I think it might be because if I knew I wouldn't be able to look for them. -- Douglas Adams
Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh. -- Douglas Adams
Where do you get the inspiration for your books?
I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I've thought of an idea. -- Douglas Adams
Damn and blast British Telecom, shouted Dirk, the words coming easily from force of habit. -- Douglas Adams
He has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts. -- Douglas Adams
Excuse me," said the owner of the metal hand in a voice that would have made an insect of a more sentimental disposition collapse in tears.
This was not such an insect, and it couldn't stand robots.
"Yes, sir," it snapped, "can I help you?"
"I doubt it," said Marvin. -- Douglas Adams
I think we have different value systems." - Arthur
"Well mine's better." - Ford -- Douglas Adams
It's translating for you. It's a Babel fish. Look it up in the book if you like. -- Douglas Adams
If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. -- Douglas Adams
Conceited little mega-puppy. -- Douglas Adams
The simple truth is that interstellar distance will not fit the human imagination. -- Douglas Adams
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem. -- Douglas Adams
The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up. -- Douglas Adams
The point is, you see," said Ford, "that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later. -- Douglas Adams
His white hair seemed to be waving at someone it knew in the next room. -- Douglas Adams
He continued to lie there, like someone lying awake at four o'clock in the morning, unable to put his mind to rest, but unable to find anything to do with it. -- Douglas Adams
I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer. -- Douglas Adams
I have the instinctive reaction of a Western man when confronted with sublimely incomprehensible. I grab my camera and start to photograph it -- Douglas Adams
It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion on 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
Do not be alarmed, I will not harm you. -- Douglas Adams
It's all right, she said in a voice which would have calmed the Big Bang down. -- Douglas Adams
They would appear," said Ford doubtfully, "to have turned into a bowl of petunias and a very surprised-looking whale -- Douglas Adams
Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this. -- Douglas Adams
This is not, however, an ideal Universe, -- Douglas Adams
Did you ever go to a place ... I think it was called Norway?" "No," said Arthur, "no, I didn't." "Pity," said Slartibartfast, "that was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges. I was most upset to hear of its destruction. -- Douglas Adams
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 -- Douglas Adams
You can't throw us into space," yelled Ford, "we're trying to write a book." "Resistance is useless!" shouted the Vogon guard back at him. It was the first phrase he'd learned when he joined the Vogon Guard Corps. -- Douglas Adams
They've got as much sex appeal as a road accident. -- Douglas Adams
After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him. -- Douglas Adams
High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse. -- Douglas Adams
The secret of healthy hitchhiking is to eat junk food. -- Douglas Adams
Even the most seasoned star tramp can't help but shiver at the spectacular drama of a sunrise seen from space, -- 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
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
I find the difference, for me, between having no money and having quite a bit is that the bills get bigger. And that's it. The lifestyle doesn't change. -- Douglas Adams
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. -- Douglas Adams
A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other. -- Douglas Adams
Here, for whatever reason, is the world. And here it stays. With me on it. -- 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
We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them. -- Douglas Adams
Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody. -- Douglas Adams
WOKING (vb.) To enter the kitchen with the precise determination to perform something only to forget what it is just before you do it. -- Douglas Adams
Life!" urged Fook. "The Universe!" said Lunkwill. "Everything!" they said in chorus. -- Douglas Adams
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in; fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well! It must have been made to have me in it! -- 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
Then why did you ask me?' it screamed.
'I just wanted something to talk to,' said Marvin. -- Douglas Adams
Try and understand his problem," insisted Ford. "Here he is, poor lad, his entire life's work is stamping around, throwing people off spaceships ... " "And shouting," added the guard. -- Douglas Adams
That's the point, it's out of date now, -- Douglas Adams
The chances of finding out what's really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied. -- Douglas Adams
Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner. -- Douglas Adams
The last thing he wanted after a hellish night like this one was some blasted day coming along and barging about the place. -- Douglas Adams
Did a swift burst of mental arithmetic, arrived at an answer he liked and -- Douglas Adams
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. -- Douglas Adams
Time doesn't necessarily happen in chronological order. -- Douglas Adams
He noticed that something was going on. His finger shot upward. "What the hell's that?" he -- Douglas Adams
Nobody got murdered before lunch. But nobody. People weren't up to it. You needed a good lunch to get both the blood-sugar and blood-lust levels up. -- Douglas Adams
Sorry, did I say something wrong?" said Marvin, dragging himself on regardless. "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God I'm so depressed. Here's another one of those self-satisfied doors. Life! Don't talk to me about life. -- Douglas Adams
What the photon is it?" "Oh, just some five-million-year-old tape that's being broadcast at us." "A what? A recording? -- Douglas Adams
Hey this is terrific!" Zaphod said. "Someone down there is trying to kill us! -- Douglas Adams
Ha, but my life is a box of wormgears. -- Douglas Adams
I don't go to mythical places with strange men. -- Douglas Adams
We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. -- Douglas Adams
Number Two's eyes narrowed and became what are known in the Shouting and Killing People trade as cold slits, the idea presumably being to give your opponent the impression that you have lost your glasses or are having difficulty keeping awake. Why this is frightening is an, as yet, unsolved problem. -- Douglas Adams
The Saab seethed off into the night. Arthur watched it go, as stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for five years, suddenly discovers that he had merely been wearing too large a hat. -- Douglas Adams
Yes, it is true that sometimes unusually intelligent and sensitive children can appear to be stupid. But stupid children can sometimes appear to be stupid as well. I think that's something you might have to consider. -- Douglas Adams
Mr. Beeblebrox, sir,' said the insect in awed wonder, 'you're so weird you should be in movies.;
'Yeah,' said Zaphod patting the thing on a glittering pink wing, 'and you, baby, should be in real life.' The insect paused for a moment -- Douglas Adams
Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons. -- Douglas Adams
They live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief -- Douglas Adams
Life ... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast. -- Douglas Adams
Pardon me for breathing, which I never do any way so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God, I'm so depressed. -- Douglas Adams
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. -- Douglas Adams
For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and satisfied, drove on into the night. -- Douglas Adams
It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. -- Douglas Adams
As a child, I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and remember the carol service as always such an emotional thing. -- Douglas Adams
where hyperspatial engineers sucked matter through white holes in space to form it into dream planets - gold planets, platinum planets, soft rubber planets with lots of earthquakes - all lovingly made to meet the exacting standards that the Galaxy's richest men naturally came to expect. -- Douglas Adams
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. -- Douglas Adams
My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes. -- Douglas Adams
Vogons are not above a little bribery and corruption in the same way that the sea is not above the clouds, -- Douglas Adams
Ah, thank you,' said Ford. He and Arthur took their jynnan tonnyx. Arthur sipped his, and was surprised to discover it tasted very like a whisky and soda. -- Douglas Adams
It's unpleasantly like being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water. -- Douglas Adams
plaintively. Ford -- Douglas Adams
The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along. -- Douglas Adams
A big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path. -- Douglas Adams
They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want. -- Douglas Adams
The ship had come sweeping in over a dark and somber landscape, a terrain so desperately far removed from the heat and light of its parent sun, Sol, that it seemed like a map of the psychological scars of the mind of an abandoned child. -- Douglas Adams
It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book. -- Douglas Adams
Who pursued a brilliant academic career studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and the wave harmonic theory of historical perception, -- Douglas Adams
Deep in the rain forest it was doing what it usually does in rain forests, which was raining: hence the name. -- Douglas Adams
He knew where his towel was. -- Douglas Adams
I present you with a simple choice! Either die in the vacuum of space, or ... " he paused for melodramatic effect, "tell me how good you thought my poem was! -- Douglas Adams
I don't say that I don't believe in God because that implies that there is a God for me not to believe in. -- Douglas Adams
"Does God know he [exists]?" "Of course he does. Otherwise, you could not have asked the question, and I could not have answered." -- Douglas Adams
In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing. -- Douglas Adams
I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge? -- Douglas Adams
Put away your worries, the world is a good and perfect place. It is in fact very easy. -- 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
Zaphod Beeblebrox crawled bravely along a tunnel, like the hell of a guy he was. He was very confused, but he continued crawling doggedly anyway because he was that brave. -- Douglas Adams
Shall I leave the window open or would you like to try the door? she said with a sniff. -- Douglas Adams
I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it's less good than what I do, there's no point in reading it, if it's better than what I do it makes me depressed -- Douglas Adams
Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else becomes eerily easy. -- Douglas Adams
Good," said Arthur.
"See?" said Ford.
"No," said Arthur. -- Douglas Adams
Mr. Prosser said, You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time, you know. -- Douglas Adams
Arthur had almost given up. That is to say, he was not going to give up. He was absolutely not going to give up. Not now. Not ever. But if he had been the sort of person who was going to give up, this was probably the time he would have done it. -- Douglas Adams
A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and quite a lot of millions of light-years from end to end. -- Douglas Adams
You're paid a lot and you're not happy, so the first thing you do is buy stuff that you don't want or need - for which you need more money. -- Douglas Adams
The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline. -- Douglas Adams
Would you like me to go and stick my head in a bucket of water? -- Douglas Adams
The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body. -- Douglas Adams
CLUN (n.) A leg which has gone to sleep and has to be hauled around after you. -- Douglas Adams
Proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye. -- Douglas Adams
On Earth it is never possible to be farther than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, -- Douglas Adams
And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs. -- Douglas Adams
I find that writing is a constant battle with exactly the same problems you've always had. -- Douglas Adams
There are times, however, when whatever your metabolism you have to take a deep breath. -- Douglas Adams
For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century ... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year. -- Douglas Adams
To boldly split infinitives that no man had split before ... -- Douglas Adams
As she lay beneath a pile of rubble, in pain, darkness, and choking dust, trying to find sensation in her limbs, she was at least relieved to be able to think that she hadn't merely been imagining that this was a bad day. So thinking, she passed out. -- Douglas Adams
They're just a bunch of real sweet guys, you know, who just happen to want to kill everybody. -- Douglas Adams
Think of a number, any number." "Er, five," said the mattress. "Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?" The -- Douglas Adams
The Norse God of Thunder looked at her awkwardly. He had to remove his great horned helmet because it was banging against the ceiling and leaving scratch marks in the plaster. -- Douglas Adams
Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal. -- Douglas Adams
These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings. -- Douglas Adams
Said Ford, "you've got three pints to get through." "Three pints?" said Arthur. "At lunchtime?" The man next to Ford grinned and nodded happily. Ford ignored him. -- 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
There was a terribly ghastly silence.
There was a terribly ghastly noise.
There was a terribly ghastly silence. -- Douglas Adams
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
I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style -- Douglas Adams
Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with. -- Douglas Adams
What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"Ask a glass of water! -- Douglas Adams
This is terrific," Arthur thought to himself, "Nelson's Column has gone, McDonald's has gone, all that's left is me and the words Mostly harmless. Any second now all that will be left is Mostly harmless. And yesterday the planet seemed to be going so well." A -- Douglas Adams
The party blundered helplessly across the sky like a man leaning against an unexpectedly open door. It spun and wobbled on its hover jets. It tried to right itself and wronged itself instead. -- Douglas Adams
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes. -- Douglas Adams
Don't worry. Everything is getting nicely out of control. -- Douglas Adams
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost for ever. This is not her story. -- Douglas Adams
Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now? -- Douglas Adams
He's spending a year dead for tax reasons. -- Douglas Adams
We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books. -- Douglas Adams
We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win. -- Douglas Adams
I have rooms full of little dongly things and don't want any more. Half the little dongly things I've got, I don't even know what gizmo they're for. More importantly, half the gizmos I've got, I don't know where their little dongly thing is. -- Douglas Adams
Technology is the name we give to stuff that doesn't work properly yet -- Douglas Adams
But naturally my shoulder, sir,' mooed the animal contentedly, 'nobody else's is mine to offer. -- Douglas Adams
A mobile phone needs a manual in the way that a teacup doesn't -- Douglas Adams
Groop I implore thee," continued the merciless Vogon, "my foonting turlingdromes. -- Douglas Adams
If you've done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe? -- Douglas Adams
The sky, from one horizon to another, from east to west, from north to south, was utterly and completely black. -- Douglas Adams
Generally, old media don't die. They just have to grow old gracefully. Guess what, we still have stone masons. They haven't been the primary purveyors of the written word for a while now of course, but they still have a role because you wouldn't want a TV screen on your headstone. -- Douglas Adams
When the girl sitting at the next table looked away from a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened. -- Douglas Adams
If the insurance company failed to pay up - which seemed increasingly likely in light of the strategy that insurance companies had adopted in recent years, of merely advertising their services rather than actually providing them - Dirk -- Douglas Adams
As soon as Mr. Prosser realized that he was substantially the loser after all, it was as if a weight lifted itself off his shoulders: this was more like the world as he knew it. -- Douglas Adams
Have you met Thor? He makes thunder. -- Douglas Adams
Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out. -- Douglas Adams
Virtually everything we were told in Indonesia turned out not to be true, sometimes almost immediately. The only exception to this was when we were told that something would happen immediately, in which case it turned out not to be true over an extended period of time. -- Douglas Adams
The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realized that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there. -- Douglas Adams
I vaguely remember my schooldays. They were what was going on in the background while I was trying to listen to the Beatles. -- Douglas Adams
Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and watered the lives of many people whose lives might otherwise have been darker and dryer. Then, -- Douglas Adams
I hate that door," continued Marvin. "I'm not getting you down at all, am I? -- Douglas Adams
The main reception foyer was almost empty but Ford nevertheless weaved his way through it. -- Douglas Adams
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. -- Douglas Adams
For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact 42- and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was. -- Douglas Adams
Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe there is a reason. -- Douglas Adams
The dew has fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning. -- Douglas Adams
Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others. -- Douglas Adams
Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or - what's that strange thing you British play?" "Er, cricket? Self-loathing?" "Parliamentary democracy. -- Douglas Adams
Today was the day; today was the day when they would realize what Zaphod had been up to. Today was what Zaphod Beeblebrox's presidency was all about. -- Douglas Adams
Zaphod marched quickly down the passageway, nervous as hell, but trying to hide it by striding purposefully. -- Douglas Adams
The little waiter's eyebrows wandered about his forehead in confusion. -- Douglas Adams
Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion is the better part of valor, so was cowardice is the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet. -- Douglas Adams
Computer," said Zaphod, "tell us what our present trajectory is. -- Douglas Adams
According to the legends," he said, "the Magratheans lived most of their lives underground." "Why's that?" said Arthur. "Did the surface become too polluted or overpopulated?" "No, I don't think so," said Zaphod. "I think they just didn't like it very much. -- Douglas Adams
But what about the End of the Universe? We'll miss the big moment."
I've seen it. It's rubbish," said Zaphod,"nothing but a gnab gib."
A what?"
Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let's get zappy. -- Douglas Adams
I figure this," said Zaphod. "Whatever happened to my mind, I did it. And I did it in such a way that it wouldn't be detected by the Government screening tests. -- Douglas Adams
What is this? Some sort of galactic hyperhearse? -- Douglas Adams
Listen, Ford," said Zaphod, "everything's cool and froody." "You mean everything's under control." "No," said Zaphod, "I do not mean everything's under control. That would not be cool and froody. -- 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
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
Impact minus twenty seconds, guys . . ." said the computer. "Then turn the bloody engines back on!" bawled Zaphod. "Oh, sure thing, guys," said the computer. -- Douglas Adams
Marvin started his ironical humming again. Zaphod hit him and he shut up. -- Douglas Adams
Trying to predict the future is a mug's game. But increasingly it's a game we all have to play because the world is changing so fast and we need to have some sort of idea of what the future's actually going to be like because we are going to have to live there, probably next week. -- Douglas Adams
Marvels of the Universe -- Douglas Adams
There was only one ambition that anyone on the planet ever had, and that was to leave. -- Douglas Adams
I like the cover," he said. "Don't Panic. It's the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day. -- Douglas Adams
How do you feel?" he asked him. "Like a military academy," said Arthur. "Bits of me keep on passing out. -- Douglas Adams
I have the brain the size of a planet and you want to talk to me about life -- Douglas Adams
Mixture of pleasure and pain," he muttered. "Always does the trick. -- Douglas Adams
Sorry, can I interrupt you a moment, Peter, and say that the sofa has just vanished.' 'So it has. Well, that's one mystery less. -- Douglas Adams
And so the Universe ended. -- Douglas Adams
Yeah, I'm sure that's him," he would add when shown a picture of Gordon Way. "I only wasn't sure at first because in the picture he's got his mouth closed. -- Douglas Adams
Except that the legends say the Magratheans used to manufacture planets. -- Douglas Adams
Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila. -- Douglas Adams
There was a sort of gallery structure in the roof space which held a bed and also a bathroom which you could actually swing a cat in. But only if it was a reasonably patient cat and didn't mind a few nasty cracks about the head. -- Douglas Adams
The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don't even know you are making. -- Douglas Adams
Rubbish, we don't want to be happy, we want to be famous! (Lunkwill) -- Douglas Adams
Life is wasted on the living. -- Douglas Adams
There is a piece of me that likes to fondly imagine my maverick and rebellious nature. But, more accurately, I like to have a nice and cosy institution that I can rub up against a little bit. -- Douglas Adams
OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah? -- Douglas Adams
Ten million years, Earthman ... can you conceive of that kind of time span? A galactic civilization could grow from a single worm five times over in that time. Gone.' He paused. -- Douglas Adams
To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we're probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot. -- Douglas Adams
He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher ... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. -- Douglas Adams
I've had the sort of day that would make St. Francis of Assisi kick babies. -- Douglas Adams
He felt the
way he imagined an angel must feel during its celebrated dance on the head of
a pin whilst being counted by philosophers. -- Douglas Adams
The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. -- Douglas Adams
And what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterward. -- Douglas Adams
The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. -- Douglas Adams
Presidents don't have power. Their job is to draw attention away from it. -- Douglas Adams
She stared at them with the worried frown of a drunk trying to work out why the door is dancing. -- Douglas Adams
You live and learn. At any rate, you live. -- Douglas Adams
The more I think about our species the more I think we just do stuff and make up explanations later when asked. But it's not true that I would rather write than read. I would rather read than write. To be honest I would rather hang upside down in a bucket than write. -- Douglas Adams
Books are sharks ... because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark. -- Douglas Adams
You mean," said Arthur, "you mean you can see into my mind?"
"Yes," said Marvin.
Arthur stared in astonishment.
"And ... ?" he said.
"It amazes me how you can manage to live in anything that small. -- Douglas Adams
A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that. -- Douglas Adams
He actually caught himself saying things like "Yippee," as he pranced ridiculously round the house. -- Douglas Adams
There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Now concentrate! -- Douglas Adams
So we're not home and dry," he said. "We could not even be said," replied Ford, "to be home and vigorously toweling ourselves off. -- Douglas Adams
Insanity is a gradual process - don't rush it. -- Douglas Adams
God's Final Message to His Creation:
'We apologize for the inconvenience. -- Douglas Adams
Ford was beginning to behave rather strangely, or rather not actually beginning to behave strangely but beginning to behave in a way that was strangely different from the other strange ways in which he more regularly behaved. -- Douglas Adams
There are two things in particular that it [the computer industry] failed to foresee: one was the coming of the Internet( ... ); the other was the fact that the century would end. -- Douglas Adams
Bring the two aliens up here under surveillance." With a microsecond pause, and a finely calculated micro-modulation of pitch and timbre - nothing you could actually take offense at - Marvin managed to convey his utter contempt and horror of all things human. "Just that?" he said. -- Douglas Adams
The thing that used to worry him most was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was looking so worried -- Douglas Adams
We always had the greatest arguments over sex and fishing. -- Douglas Adams
We demand admission! -- Douglas Adams
I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it," said Marvin. "And what happened?" pressed Ford. "It committed suicide," said Marvin, -- Douglas Adams
Ah ... ! What's happening? it thought. Er, excuse me, who am I? Hello? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Calm down, get a grip now ... oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it? -- Douglas Adams
Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? -- Douglas Adams
Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command. -- Douglas Adams
You know because you've been it, and I know because I'm dead and it gives one such a wonderfully uncluttered perspective. -- Douglas Adams
This was a public telephone so it was clearly an oversight that it was working at all. -- Douglas Adams
I have detected disturbances in the wash.'
'The wash?'
'The space-time wash.'
'Are we talking about some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?'
'Eddies in the space-time continuum.'
'Ah ... is he. Is he.'
'What?'
'Er, who is Eddy, then, exactly? -- Douglas Adams
Alone of all the races on earth, they seem to be free from the 'Grass is Greener on the other side of the fence' syndrome, and roundly proclaim that Australia is, in fact, the other side of that fence. -- Douglas Adams
A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature.'" "GPP feature?" said Arthur. "What's that?" "Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities. -- Douglas Adams
What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand. -- Douglas Adams
You're a jerk,' repeated the alien, 'a complete asshole. -- Douglas Adams
If you ever find you need help again, you know, if you're in trouble, need a hand out of a corner ... "
"Yeah?"
"Please don't hesitate to get lost. -- Douglas Adams
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
Could be. I'm a pretty dangerous dude when I'm cornered."
"Yeah," said the voice from under the table, "you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel. -- Douglas Adams
Democracy is all about not electing the wrong man-eating lizard. -- 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
Stared fixedly into the sky like a rabbit trying to get run over by a car. -- Douglas Adams
I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is. -- Douglas Adams
There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind. -- Douglas Adams
Once described by Eccentrica Gallumbits as the Best Bang since the Big One, -- Douglas Adams
The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in. -- Douglas Adams
The bowler approached the wicket at a lope, a trot, and then a run. He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball. -- Douglas Adams
Beppu (n.)
The triumphant slamming shut of a book after reading the final page. -- Douglas Adams
There was a terrible ghastly silence. There was a terrible ghastly noise. There was a terrible ghastly silence. The -- Douglas Adams
Life," said Marvin, "don't talk to me about life. -- Douglas Adams
A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind. -- Douglas Adams
Life! Don't talk to me about life! -- Douglas Adams
It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training. -- Douglas Adams
And the Universe, ... will explode later for your pleasure. -- Douglas Adams
Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.'
Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that. -- Douglas Adams
Cyberspace is - or can be - a good, friendly and egalitarian place to meet. -- Douglas Adams
Aaaaaaarggggghhhhhh! -- Douglas Adams
The Great Zaganza said: You are very fat and stupid and persistently wear a ridiculous hat which you should be ashamed of. -- Douglas Adams
Yes. I much prefer it here. So much less reputable, so much more fraught. -- Douglas Adams
It gives me my headache just trying to think down to your level -- 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
Marvin was humming ironically because he hated humans so much. -- Douglas Adams
A carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape. -- Douglas Adams
And that's why the American habit of bringing a teacup, a tea bag, and a pot of hot water to the table is merely the perfect way of making a thin, pale, watery cup of tea that nobody in their right mind would want to drink. -- Douglas Adams
Imagine" he said, "never even thinking, 'We are alone,' simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there's any other way to be. -- Douglas Adams
We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway. -- Douglas Adams
Because there are some things you have to do even if you are an enlightened liberal cop who knows all about sensitivity and everything! -- Douglas Adams
Her laughter seemed to discharge something in the atmosphere. From somewhere at the back of the crowd a single voice started to sing a tune that would have enabled Paul McCartney, had he written it, to buy the world. -- Douglas Adams
No," said Arthur, "no," he added thoughtfully. "No," he added again, even more thoughtfully. "What?" he said at last. -- Douglas Adams
No one with a thirst for knowledge goes to the university now. Half of the faculty has resigned, the other half gives courses in advanced ignorance -- Douglas Adams
The safety of the crew is absolutely assured. -- Douglas Adams
I'm so great even I get tongue-tied talking to myself. -- Douglas Adams
And then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. -- Douglas Adams
Life," said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it. -- Douglas Adams
This was perfectly true, and a very respectable view widely held by right-thinking people, who are largely recognizable as being right-thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view. -- Douglas Adams
We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever. -- Douglas Adams
It was just that he was fun in such an exhausting way because, being in advertising, he always wanted you to know how much fun he was having and where he had got his jacket from. -- Douglas Adams
The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basic sherry, but refuses to catch your eye. -- Douglas Adams
Poor Arthur, you're not really cut out for this life, are you?" "You call this life?" "You're beginning to sound like Marvin." "Marvin's the clearest thinker I know. -- Douglas Adams
If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like. ... But on the other hand, if somebody says, 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday,' you say, 'Fine, I respect that.' -- Douglas Adams
The Macintosh may only have 10% of the market, but it is clearly the top 10%. -- Douglas Adams
Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?" "How much?" said Arthur. "None at all," said Mr. Prosser, -- Douglas Adams
Come off it, Mr. Dent," he said, "you can't win, you know. You can't lie in front of the bulldozer indefinitely." He tried to make his eyes blaze fiercely but -- Douglas Adams
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem. -- Douglas Adams
There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick. -- Douglas Adams
Life was too short, the weather too fine, and the world too full of interesting and exciting pitfalls. -- Douglas Adams
They claimed it was for the sake of their grandparents and grandchildren, but it was of course for the sake of their grandparent's grandchildren, and their grandchildren's grandparents. -- Douglas Adams
The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind. -- Douglas Adams
How do you know you're having fun if there's no one watching you have it? -- Douglas Adams
Space is unimaginably big. -- Douglas Adams
While his mind was for a moment filled with inexplicable but terribly attractive visions of Arthur Dent's house being consumed with fire and Arthur himself running screaming from the blazing ruin with at least three hefty spears protruding from his back. -- Douglas Adams
I'm 48, which is a bit of a shock to me. Why only last year I thought I was a precocious young thing! -- Douglas Adams
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious. -- Douglas Adams
All this Magrathea nonsense seemed juvenile. Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? All -- Douglas Adams
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. -- Douglas Adams
Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth. -- Douglas Adams
But that's not the point!" raged Ford "The point is that I am now a perfectly safe penguin, and my colleague here is rapidly running out of limbs! -- Douglas Adams
I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact, I wanted to be John Cleese, and it took me some time to realise that the job was, in fact, taken. -- Douglas Adams
One conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male didn't actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological absurdity you otherwise find only in discotheques. -- Douglas Adams
Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game. -- Douglas Adams
The driver wound down the window and leaned out. "Had a crash then?" he shouted at them. "Yes." "Ha!" he said and drove on -- Douglas Adams
Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it. 'It's just life,' they say. -- Douglas Adams
Capital Letters Were Always The Best Way Of Dealing With Things You Didn't Have A Good Answer To. -- Douglas Adams
He put some more cold pizza into his face. -- Douglas Adams
Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers. -- Douglas Adams
Never throw the letter Q into a privet bush. -- Douglas Adams
And made what an outside observer would have thought was a heroic effort to cross the room. -- Douglas Adams
Watching the very last glimmers of light sink into blackness behind the horizon. -- Douglas Adams
I have been listening," said Arthur, "but I'm not sure it's helped. -- Douglas Adams
A computer chatted to itself in alarm as it noticed an airlock open and close itself for no apparent reason.
This was because Reason was in fact out to lunch. -- Douglas Adams
He hadn't realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers for the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones until it now said something it had never said to him before, which was "yes". -- Douglas Adams
The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. -- Douglas Adams
...just because you see something, it doesn't mean to say it's there. And if you don't see something, it doesn't mean to say it's not there. It's only what your senses bring to your attention. -- Douglas Adams
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does. -- Douglas Adams
She wish she knew what it was she was trying not to think about -- Douglas Adams
Who is this god person anyway? -- Douglas Adams
Six pints of bitter, said Ford Prefect. And quickly please, the world's about to end. -- Douglas Adams
The sun was beginning to dry out the mud that Arthur lay in. -- Douglas Adams
That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herself that that was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final real ulimate it. -- Douglas Adams
After ten years of word processing, I can't even do hand writing anymore. -- Douglas Adams
I think he probably wants you to play Scrabble with him again,' said Ford, 'he's pointing to the letters.'
'Probably spelt crzjgrdwldiwdc again, I keep on telling him there's only one g in crzjgrdwldiwdc. -- Douglas Adams
My name," he said, "is Slartibartfast." Arthur -- Douglas Adams
Whatever your tastes, Magrathea can cater for you. We are not proud. -- 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
He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. "I will go mad!" he annouced. -- Douglas Adams
He inched his way up the corridor as if he would rather be yarding his way down it, which was true. -- Douglas Adams
Very strange people, physicists - in my experience the ones who aren't dead are in some way very ill. -- Douglas Adams
I could have more fun in cat litter. -- Douglas Adams
For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says You are here. -- Douglas Adams
Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy - not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. -- Douglas Adams
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
Moving from radio to television, you can take most of the words with you. -- Douglas Adams
Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future. -- Douglas Adams
The horse, it must be said, was quite surprised. -- Douglas Adams
I see", said Arthur Dent. He didn't. -- Douglas Adams
According to her watch it was shortly after three o'clock, and according to everything else it was night-time. -- Douglas Adams
The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if you don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't go and look because you won't enjoy it. -- Douglas Adams
But thanks for taking an interest," said the Vogon guard. "Bye now. -- Douglas Adams
On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you. -- Douglas Adams
The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat. -- Douglas Adams
In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal. -- Douglas Adams
When I hear Mozart, I understand what it is to be a human being; when I hear Beethoven, I understand what it is to be Beethoven; but when I hear Bach, understand what it is to be the Universe. -- Douglas Adams
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport. -- Douglas Adams
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
Time travel, by its very nature, was invented in all periods of history simultaneously. -- Douglas Adams
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. ... Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties. -- Douglas Adams
I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed. -- Douglas Adams
He had no idea what he was in for, but he knew that he hadn't liked anything that had happened so far and didn't think things were likely to change. -- Douglas Adams
Please call me Eddie if it will help you to relax. -- Douglas Adams
I don't know, apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at all. -- Douglas Adams
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. -- Douglas Adams
ABOYNE (vb.)
To beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him. -- Douglas Adams
Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent, said the old man, sternly. -- Douglas Adams
Uglier things have been spotted in the skies, but not by reliable witnesses. -- Douglas Adams
To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity. -- Douglas Adams
Time blossomed, matter shrank away. The highest prime number coalesced quietly in a corner and hid itself away for ever. -- Douglas Adams
It's not the fall that kills you; it's the sudden stop at the end. -- Douglas Adams
Why," said Arthur Dent, "isn't anyone ever pleased to see us? -- Douglas Adams
Slartibartfast's study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library. -- Douglas Adams
The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them -- Douglas Adams
Two contestants would sit either side of a table, with a glass in front of each of them. -- Douglas Adams
Time is not currently one of my problems. - Arthur Dent -- Douglas Adams
Goosnargh, said Ford Prefect, which was a special Betelgeusian word he used when he knew he should say something but didn't know what it should be. -- Douglas Adams
We have a saying up here. 'Life is wasted on the living. -- Douglas Adams
My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay. -- Douglas Adams
We've arrived at another of those doors." There was a sliding door let -- Douglas Adams
Nice day for it." "Yes," said a passing maniac. -- Douglas Adams
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
Aberystwyth (n.)
A nostalgic yearning which is in itself more pleasant than the thing being yearned for. -- Douglas Adams
I'd far rather be happy than right any day. -- Douglas Adams
In space travel, all the numbers are awful. -- Douglas Adams
I think that the BBC's attitude toward the show while it was in production was very similar to that which Macbeth had toward murdering people - initial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the undertaking and still no end in sight. -- Douglas Adams
History was gathering itself to deliver another blow -- Douglas Adams
Was friend the word? He seemed more like a succession of extraordinary events than a person. -- Douglas Adams
One always overcompensates for disabilities. I'm thinking of having my entire body surgically removed. -- Douglas Adams
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened. -- Douglas Adams
The Presidents job, is not to wield power himself, but to lead attention away from it. -- Douglas Adams
As a result of all this hardship, dirt, thirst, and wombats, you would expect Australians to be a dour lot. Instead, they are genial, jolly, cheerful, and always willing to share a kind word with a stranger, unless they are an American. -- Douglas Adams
like a hunter stalking his prey. -- Douglas Adams
There was one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole. -- Douglas Adams
Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around. -- Douglas Adams
He paused just long enough to make them feel they ought to say something, and then interrupted. -- Douglas Adams
Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins. -- Douglas Adams
Yes," called out the sort of people who call out "yes" when comedians ask them if they're having a wonderful time. -- Douglas Adams
Freedom," he said out loud... "I can't cope with it".. -- Douglas Adams
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
The new bill reads 'To: saving human race from total extinction - no charge.' -- Douglas Adams
The story goes that I first had the idea for The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck. -- Douglas Adams
Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes -- Douglas Adams
I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg
Ron stole Meggy's heart away and I got Sidney's leg. -- Douglas Adams
Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose. -- Douglas Adams
He shifted his weight from foot to foot, but it was equally uncomfortable on each. -- Douglas Adams
Unfortunately I got stuck on the Earth for rather longer than I intended, -- Douglas Adams
He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which. -- Douglas Adams
I'm afraid you're going to have to accept it, -- Douglas Adams
One thing" he further added "has suddenly ceased to lead to another -- Douglas Adams
He goggled at her as if she'd said something very strange about beetroots. -- Douglas Adams
I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be. -- Douglas Adams
Then Frankie said: 'Here's a thought. How many roads must a man walk down? -- Douglas Adams
Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, -- Douglas Adams
You'll have a national Philosopher's strike on your hands! -- 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
42 is a nice number that you can take home and introduce to your family. -- Douglas Adams
In most cases, however, the terror was extremely short-lived, as was the person experiencing the terror. -- Douglas Adams
There is a particular disdain with which Siamese cats regard you. Anyone who has walked in on the Queen cleaning her teeth will be familiar with the feeling. -- Douglas Adams
It's quicker, easier, and involves less licking -- Douglas Adams
The single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood. -- Douglas Adams
'These things will become clear to you,' said the old man gently, 'at least,' he added with slight doubt in his voice, 'clearer than they are at the moment.' -- Douglas Adams
If they don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. -- Douglas Adams
She tried to worry that something terrible had happened to him, but didn't believe it for a moment. Nothing terrible ever happened to him, though she was beginning to think that it was time it damn well did. If nothing terrible happened to him soon maybe she'd do it herself. Now there was an idea. -- Douglas Adams
A thoroughly ridiculous form of transport, but a thoroughly beautiful one. -- Douglas Adams
We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying. -- Douglas Adams
May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months. -- Douglas Adams
I like everything," moaned the robot. "Especially when you shout at me like that. Do it again, please. -- Douglas Adams
Don't panic and carry a towel -- Douglas Adams
What's so great about being stuck in a dust cloud? -- Douglas Adams
The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front. -- Douglas Adams
There you are, Arthur," said Ford with the air of someone reaching the conclusion of his argument, "you think you've got problems. -- Douglas Adams
The mice will see you now," he said. -- Douglas Adams
The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn't ring. Or the phone. -- Douglas Adams
The rest of you ... keep banging the rocks together -- Douglas Adams
His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. -- Douglas Adams
Holy Zarquon, did I ask for an existentialist elevator? -- Douglas Adams
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. -- 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
Shit!" yelled Arthur as helpfully as he could. -- Douglas Adams
Where do you get inspiration for your books?
I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I thought of an idea. -- Douglas Adams
We'll meet the meat. -- Douglas Adams
carbon-based bipedal -- Douglas Adams
She remembered wondering what it was that the Albanians exported in such an anonymous way, but when on one occasion she had looked it up, she found that their only export was electricity - which, if she remembered her high school physics correctly, was unlikely to be moved around in lorries. -- Douglas Adams
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
I think the idea of art kills creativity. -- Douglas Adams
See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that. -- Douglas Adams
Never mind," said Ford. "Rome wasn't burned in a day. -- Douglas Adams
Does that matter at this stage?" shouted Arthur. -- Douglas Adams
Structural linguistrong>sstrong>ticstrong>sstrong> istrong>sstrong> a bitterly divided and unhappy profestrong>sstrong>strong>sstrong>ion, and a large number of itstrong>sstrong> practitionerstrong>sstrong> strong>sstrong>pend many nightstrong>sstrong> drowning their strong>sstrong>orrowstrong>sstrong> in Ouistrong>sstrong>ghian Zodahstrong>sstrong>. -- Douglas Adams