Douglas Adams
125 quotes
Biography
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
"The story so far:In the beginning the Universe was created.This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
"Life is wasted on the living."
"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
"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."
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that."
"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."
"Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"
"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?"
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."
"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
"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."
"I'd far rather be happy than right any day."
"This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
"So this is it,"said Arthur, "We are going to die.""Yes,"said Ford, "except... no! Wait a minute!"He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur's line of vision. "What's this switch?"he cried."What? Where?"cried Arthur, twisting round."No, I was only fooling,"said Ford, "we are going to die after all."
"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."
"If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat."
"What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer."
"He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which."
"One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious."