Quotes from 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.

It was odd, Kate reflected, that people who needed to bully you were the easiest to push around.

Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or — what's that strange thing you British play?" "Er, cricket? Self-loathing?" "Parliamentary democracy.

Like all Vogon ships it looked as if it had been not so much designed as congealed. The unpleasant yellow lumps and edifices which protruded from it at unsightly angles would have disfigured the looks of most ships, but in this case that was sadly impossible. Uglier things have been spotted in the skies, but not by reliable witnesses.

Even supposing this was the home of some ancient civilization now gone to dust, even supposing a number of exceedingly unlikely things, there was no way that vast treasures of wealth were going to be stored there in any form that would still have meaning now. He shrugged. "I think it's just a dead planet," he said.

Of course, the computer isn't any of these things. These are all things we were previously familiar with from the real world, which we have modelled in the computer so that we can use the damn thing. Which should tell us something interesting. The computer is actually a modelling device.

Life',said Marvin,'don't talk to me about life

Shaving mirror-pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window. Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent's bristles.

The Monk currently believed that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including the Monk itself and the Monk's horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink.

Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shell-shocked fragments the previous day had left him with.

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know becasue you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.

When the girl sitting at the next table looked away for a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened.

In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures' plans.

When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well.

The officer's next point was that I wasn't in the universe, I was in England, a point that has been made to me before.

It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever. When

As zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it is like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the titles of books that will now never be read.

And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more.

The little book of instructions suggested that he should simply concentrate 'soulfully' on the question which was 'besieging' him, write it down, ponder on it, enjoy the silence, and then once he had achieved inner harmony and tranquillity he should push the red button. There wasn't a red button, but there was a blue button marked 'Red', and this Dirk took to be the one.

Ah . . . ! What's happening? it thought. Er, excuse me, who am I? Hello? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Calm down, get a grip now . . . oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it?

What the photon is it?" "Oh, just some five-million-year-old tape that's being broadcast at us." "A what? A recording?

Plenty of people didn't care for him much, but 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. It was a difference which kept the vast majority of the population alive from day to day.

Life!" urged Fook. "The Universe!" said Lunkwill. "Everything!" they said in chorus.

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.