Douglas Adams Quotes

377 Sourced Quotes

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
… Most of the words that airline staff used, or rather most of the sentences into which they were habitually arranged, had been worked so hard that they had died.

Douglas Adams
"Life," he said, "is like a grapefruit." "Er, how so?" "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
'Totally mad,' he said, 'utter nonsense. But we'll do it because it's brilliant nonsense.'

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
Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it," said Marvin. "And what happened?" pressed Ford. "It committed suicide," said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold.

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
Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.

Douglas Adams
There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

Douglas Adams
I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

Douglas Adams
The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time ever.

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
LAXOBIGGING (ptcpl. vb.) Struggling to extrude an extremely large turd.

Douglas Adams
The Answer to the Great Question Of…Life, the Universe and Everything…[is] Forty-two.

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
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
Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila.

Douglas Adams
The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules

Douglas Adams
Several billion trillion tons of super hot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.

Douglas Adams
My favorite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done. This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favorite 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
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
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
Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh.

Douglas Adams
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And … the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

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