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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. <