Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams

Writer, Humorist

Douglas Adams was a British author known for his satirical science fiction, particularly 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,' which explores absurdity and existence.

Thinking People Men Funny Two Believe
Born
March 11, 1952
Quotes
578
Rank
#428

Quote collection

Douglas Adams quotes (page 18 of 29)

578 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Douglas Adams Writer, Humorist
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"Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you traveled. This will come to you as a profound shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister."

Sister Time Brother
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"A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach, and drifted back to the sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea."

Beach Sea Mad
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"We live in strange times. We also live in strange places, each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universe are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own."

Strange Places People Shadow
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"I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer."

Thinking Order People
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"That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herself that that was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final real ulimate it."

Real Finals Seconds
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"[The Head of Radio Three] had been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase "too much Mozart" was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy."

Philosophy College Men
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"When the idea comes, I often can't remember where it came from. I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker's. It's almost as if someone else wrote it."

Writing Ideas Often Can
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"People always make this totally artificial distinction between what is commercial and what is good. They quote that maxim "Nobody ever lost money underestimating the public's taste" and I think that's very wrongheaded. I like to believe the audience is actually intelligent, because it's made up of other people like yourself."

Believe Intelligent Thinking
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"There are two things you should remember when dealing with parallel universes. One, they're not really parallel, and two, they're not really universes"

Two Remember Should
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"There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again."

Falling In Love Mean Years
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"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."

Evil Laughing Wicked
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"There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound."

Art Opportunity Simple
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"Insofar as she recognized at all that she was dreaming, she realized that she must be exploring her subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was really clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins."

Dream Brain Mind
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"The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination."

Distance Simple Imagination
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"Assumptions are the things we don't know we're making."

Assumption Knows
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"A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind."

Beach Real House
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"Sir,' I said to the universe, 'I exist.' 'That,' said the universe, 'creates no sense of obligation in me whatsoever."

Said Obligation Universe
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"He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left."

Feet Different Three
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"I've never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I've seen a few and they're never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you're in the right frame of mind, which is usually around lunchtime."

People Mind Dawn
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"The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!"

Book Writing Class
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