Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

66 Sourced Quotes

View all Douglas Adams Quotes
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
Space is big. Really 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, but that's just peanuts to space.

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
It's part of the shape of the Universe. I only have to talk to somebody and they begin to hate me.

Douglas Adams
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.

Douglas Adams
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
The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up.

Douglas Adams
The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.

Douglas Adams
If they don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

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
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast.

Douglas Adams
If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

Douglas Adams
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
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

Douglas Adams
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.

Douglas Adams
Marvin trudged on down the corridor, still moaning. "...and then of course I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left hand side..." "No?" said Arthur grimly as he walked along beside him. "Really?" "Oh yes," said Marvin, "I mean I've asked for them to be replaced but no one ever listens." "I can imagine.

Douglas Adams
Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Douglas Adams
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.

Douglas Adams
How do you feel?" he asked him. "Like a military academy," said Arthur. "Bits of me keep on passing out.

Douglas Adams
These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.

Douglas Adams
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
The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?

Douglas Adams
When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard-driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidently change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your hood in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford Prefect off his.

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
Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?

Douglas Adams
Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

Douglas Adams
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
Was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomability into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

Douglas Adams
Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.

Douglas Adams
Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless

Douglas Adams