Douglas Adams Quotes and Quotation

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Ford Prefect

• "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
• "Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half of one for breakfast."
• "Oh, don't give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/No, don't you give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die/Won't you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit" - Orion Mining Song

Marvin

Zaphod Beeblebrox

• "I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer."
• "I'm so cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month! I'm so hip I have trouble seeing over my pelvis!"
• "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now."
• "You guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off."

The Book / Narration

• "The Earth - Harmless"
• "Far out in the 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 roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, opening passage.
• "Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner."
• "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."
• "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
• "There is a theory which states that if ever anybody 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."
• "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
• "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."
• "There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath."
• "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
• "...and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul."
• "The thing he realized about the windows was this: because they had been converted into openable windows after they had first been designed to be impregnable, they were, in fact, much less secure than if they had been designed as openable windows in the first place."
• "The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79."
• "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
• "He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
• "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 or repair." - Mostly Harmless
• "It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes." (Chapter 24, Life the universe and everything)
• "Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc...and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around.  Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."
• Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.

Other

• "DON'T PANIC." - Words inscribed in large, friendly letters on front cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide.
• "We demand guaranteed rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty." - Vroomfondel.
• "Forty two." - The answer to the Great Question of Life, The Universe and Everything, Deep-Thought.
• "Share and Enjoy" - Company motto of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division
• "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" - Final message from the Dolphins, as they escape just prior to Earth's destruction
• "To bang rocks together." - The way to become a civilised life-form, as broadcast on sub-ether radio.

Last Chance To See

• "[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."
• "[The aye-aye] looks a little like a large cat with a bat's ears, a beaver's teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder."
• "Here the man in blue crimplene accosted us once more but we patiently explained to him that he could fuck off."
• "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."

The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul

• "Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort."
• "It was a battered yellow Citroen 2CV which had had one careful owner but also three suicidally reckless ones."
• "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
• "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."

The Meaning of Liff (Co-written with John Lloyd)

• "ABOYNE (vb.) To beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him."
• "CLIXBY (adj.) Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly uninformative."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future

• " It'd be like a bunch of rivers, the Amazon and the Missisippi and the Congo asking how the Atlantic Ocean might affect them… and the answer is of course is that they won't be rivers anymore just currents in the ocean."
  • On his response to representatives of the music, publishing and broadcasting industries who asked Douglas at a conference how he thought technological changes will affect them.

Attributed:

• "Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game."
• "There is no problem so complicated that you cannot find a very simple answer to it if you look at in the right way."
• "I may be a pretty sad case, but I don't write jokes in base 13!"
  • Douglas Adams, referring to the theory that the disparity between the question and answer of life, the universe and everything is an obscure math joke on his part.
• "'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."

Profession

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