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Douglas Adams
Douglas Noël Adams (11 March 1952 - 11 May 2001) British author and satirist, most famous for his The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of radio plays and books; he is often referred to among fans by his initials: DNA.
Sourced:
- It's rather like a puddle waking up one morning— I know they don't normally do this, but allow me, I'm a science fiction writer— A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks: "This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact it fits me so neatly... I mean really precise isn't it?... It must have been made to have me in it." And the sun rises, and it's continuing to narrate this story about how this hole must have been made to have him in it. And as the sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking— and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it's still thinking— it's still trapped in this idea that— that the hole was there for it. And if we think that the world is here for us we will continue to destroy it in the way that we have been destroying it, because we think that we can do no harm.
- 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. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was god given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
- Source: Richard Dawkins' Eulogy for 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.
- Answering Richard Dawkins' question 'What is it about science that really gets your blood running?'. Source: Richard Dawkins' Eulogy for Douglas Adams
- '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'.
“You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot.”
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
Because of variations that exist in the radio programs, the books, and other productions these are provided in sections based on the character who declares them.
Arthur Dent
- "This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
On this particular Thursday...
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p25
- "Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' of which I wasn't previously aware."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p50
- "Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p82
- "It's at moments like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die from asphyxiation in deep space, that I wish I had listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
Ford Prefect: "Why, what did she say?"
Arthur: "I don't know, I didn't listen!"
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p75
- "Why do we need to think? Can't we just sit here and go BUDUMBUDUMBBUDUMBUDUMBUDUMB with our lips for a bit?"
Ford Prefect
- "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p24
- "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
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p15
- "It's unpleasantly like being drunk."
Arthur: "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
Ford: "You ask a glass of water."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p59
Marvin (The Paranoid Android)
- "[Trillian] is one of the least benightedly unintelligent life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting."
- "Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p140
- "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do any way so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God, I'm so depressed."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p95
- "Life. Don't talk to me about Life."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p95
- Originally by comic writer Jon Canter, good friend of Douglas Adams.
- "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."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p214
- Marvin: I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.
Mattress: Er, five.
Marvin: Wrong. You see?
The mattress was much impressed by this and realised that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind.
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."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p97
- "You guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off."
- "So, ten out of ten for style but minus several million for good thinking ok?"
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p88
- "Listen, three eyes, don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal."
- "Hand me the raprod, Plate Captain."
- "What do you think I am, completely without any moral whatsits, what are they called, those moral things?"
The Book / Narration
- "Mostly Harmless"
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p63
- This is, in its entirety, the Guide's entry on the planet Earth.
- "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 p1
- This is the first line of the novel.
- "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."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p114
- "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."
- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value— you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you—daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."
- "Hence, a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in, 'Hey you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's one frood who really knows where his towel is.'
(sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy)"
- "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."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p34
- "...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 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p19
- "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."
- "It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."
- Life, the Universe and Everything, chapter 24
- "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—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in 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."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p156
- "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."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy p156
- "It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the product of a deranged imagination."
- The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizable number of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this. The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem. This is: Change. Read it through again and you'll get it.
- The history of every major galactic civilization has passed through three distinct and recognisable phases: those of survival, inquiry, and sophistication. Otherwise known as the ‘How’, ‘Why’, and ‘Where’ phases. For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question: “How can we eat?” The second by the question: “Why do we eat?” And the third by the question: “Where should we have lunch?” The history of warfare is similarly subdivided though here the phases are retribution, anticipation, and diplomacy. Thus, retribution: “I’m going to kill you because you killed my brother.” Anticipation: “I’m going to kill you because I killed your brother.” And diplomacy: “I’m going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it.” Meanwhile, the Earthman Arthur Dent, to whom all this can be of only academic interest, as his only brother was long ago nibbled to death by an okapi, is about to be plunged into a real intergalactic war.
- Radio series, Fit the Sixth.
- The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat around the bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with."
- The Restaurant At the End of the Universe pg 262-263
Other
- "DON'T PANIC." - Words inscribed in large, friendly letters on front cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide.
- "PANIC" - Words inscribed in small, alarming letters on front cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide version 2.
- "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
- "The trick is to bang the rocks together, guys." - The way to become a civilised life-form, as broadcast on sub-ether radio.
- "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?" - Cow being served at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe
- "With a rubber duck, one's never alone." - Captain of the load of useless bloody loonies from Golgafrincham
- "The knack of flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
- Old Man: "It goes like this. Let's see now: 'Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.' That's it. It's what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open."
Arthur: "Hmmm, Well, thank you - "
Old Man: "There's another prayer that goes with it that's very important, so you'd better jot this down, too."
Arthur: "OK."
Old Man: "It goes, 'Lord, lord, lord...' It's best to put that bit in, just in case. You can never be too sure 'Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen...' And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from missing out that last part.'"
- "How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?" - The Ruler of the Universe
- "Think of a number, any number." - Asked of the mattress by Marvin
- "We apologise for the inconvenience" - God's ultimate message to humans.
- "Vell, look. Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?" - Gag Halfrunt, Zaphod's private brain care specialist
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)
- "AALST (n.) One who changes his name to be further to the front"
- "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
A BBC Radio 4 produced radio programme on how new media and technology will change our lives
- " 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.
The Salmon of Doubt
- "'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."
Attributed:
- "Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game." (Possibly from Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion)
- "There is no problem so complicated that you cannot find a very simple answer to it if you look at it 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.
- Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
- "I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: 'Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end.'"
- "The Macintosh may only have 10% of the market, but it is clearly the top 10%."
- "First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure."
- "I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
- "A nerd is someone who uses a telephone to talk to other people about telephones."
- "Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet" -- JavaOne keynote, 1999
- "The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place."
- "I first saw this program in the same week that evidence was discovered of life on Mars. This is more exciting." -- On the subject of Creatures
- "You live and learn. At any rate, you live."
- "A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'"
- "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."
Profession
- "In fact, I wanted to be John Cleese and it took some time to realise the job was in fact taken."
- "It takes an awful long time to not write a book."
- "Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in..."
- "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
- "If you've never visited or spent time in Santa Fe, New Mexico, then let me say this: you're a complete idiot. I was myself a complete idiot till about a year ago...."
Hollywood
- [Getting a movie made in Hollywood is like] "trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it."
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