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 Believe Two
Born
March 11, 1952
Quotes
578
Rank
#428

Quote collection

Douglas Adams quotes (page 22 of 29)

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

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"If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to The Door and it wasn't there . . . what then? The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief? The Door would still be there, even if the Door was not."

Believe Heart Simple
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"It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book."

Book Writing Awful
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"Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion is the better part of valor, so was cowardice is the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet."

Want Cowardice Closets
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"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."

Dimensions Mice Creatures
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"I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created."

Art Thinking Suspicious
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"I think media are at their most interesting before anybody's thought of calling them art, when people still think they're just a load of junk."

Art Thinking Media
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"The switch had two settings. You could either turn it to AUTO, in which case the awning lowered itself whenever the sun came out, or you could set it to MANUEL [sic], in which case, we assumed, a small, incompetent Spanish waiter came and did it for you."

Sea Two Sun
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"It's the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make the stand out. They're all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I've taken, then maybe you won't finish up at the end of your life" --she paused, and filled her lungs for a good should--"in a smelly old cave like this!"

Taken Opposites Decision
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"Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do." The sign read: "Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion." "It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."

Civilization Space Teeth
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"Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially."

Thinking Islands People
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"What a wonderfully exciting cough,' said the little man, quite startled by it, 'do you mind if I join you?' And with that he launched into the most extraordinary and spectacular fit of coughing which caught Arthur so much by surprise that he started to choke violently, discovered he was already doing it and got thoroughly confused."

Confused Men Mind
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"For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year."

Animal Average Years
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"I have always been absurdly, ridiculously tall. To give you an idea- when we went on school trips to Interesting and Improving Places, the form-master wouldn't say "Meet under the clock tower," or "Meet under the War Memorial," but "Meet under Adams."

War School Ideas
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"I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing."

Believe Writing Years
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"Dirk was, for one of the few times in a life of exuberantly prolific loquacity, wordless."

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"Their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do."

Science Mind Impossible
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"Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them."

Jobs Knowing Tools
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"I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be."

Ends Needed
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"We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual."

Hard Work Science Technology
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"A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and quite a lot of million light years from end to end. As it closed up [...] Two hundred and thirty-nine thousand lightly fried eggs fell out of it...materializing in a large woobly heap on the famine-struck land of Poghril in the Pansel system. The whole Poghril tribe had died out from famine except for one last man who died of cholesterol poisoning some weeks later."

Men Light Years
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