Douglas Adams Quotes

page 5

“Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.”

“I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous.”

“Much to his annoyance, a thought popped into his mind. It was very clear and very distinct, and he had now come to recognize these thoughts for what they were. His instinct was to resist them.”

“How many roads must a man walk down?”

“Do you find coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?”

“Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.”

“Who is this god person anyway?”

“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.”

“She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.”

“In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or extinction, one thing has never been in doubt - that you would at least know the answer when you were dead.”

“Marvin was humming ironically because he hated humans so much.”

“What was the self-sacrifice?"
I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes."
Why was that self-sacrifice?"
Because they were mine!" said Ford, crossly.
I think we have different value systems."
Well mine's better.”

“I was created to fulfill a function and I failed in it. I negated my own existence.”

“The difficulty with this conversation is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.”

“I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg
Ron stole Meggy's heart away and I got Sidney's leg.”

“My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.”

“The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.”

“Funny, how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.”

“The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.”

“The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying 'And another thing…' twenty minutes after admitting he'd lost the argument.”

“‎If you ever find you need help again, you know, if you're in trouble, need a hand out of a corner…"
"Yeah?"
"Please don't hesitate to get lost.”

“I've had the sort of day that would make St. Francis of Assisi kick babies.”

“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.”

“Ok," he said, "I don't like to disturb you at what I know must be a difficult and distressing time for you, but I need to know first of all if you actually realize that this is a difficult and distressing time for you.”

“I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.”

“Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason [Zaphood] had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.”

“A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind.”

“Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth.”

“What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"
"Six by nine. Forty two."
"That's it. That's all there is."
"I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe”

“Believe me, it is a great deal better to find cast-iron proof that you're innocent than to languish in a cell hoping that the police---who already think you're guilty---will find it for you.”

“Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.”

“Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”

“No. No games. He wanted her and didn't care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.”

“The little waiter's eyebrows wandered about his forehead in confusion.”

“Imagine" he said, "never even thinking, 'We are alone,' simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there's any other way to be.”

“The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basic sherry, but refuses to catch your eye.”

“They’ve got as much sex appeal as a road accident.”

“High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.”

“So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly?' I asked.
He looked at me as if I were stupid.
'You die, of course. That's what deadly means.”

“He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.”

“A computer chatted to itself in alarm as it noticed an airlock open and close itself for no apparent reason.
This was because Reason was in fact out to lunch.”

“Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others.”

“He felt like an old sponge steeped in paraffin and left in the sun to dry.”

“Zaphod marched quickly down the passageway, nervous as hell, but trying to hide it by striding purposefully.”

“Zaphod Beeblebrox crawled bravely along a tunnel, like the hell of a guy he was. He was very confused, but he continued crawling doggedly anyway because he was that brave.”

“For as long as he could remember, he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.”

“He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.”

“It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?”

“If there's any real truth, it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.”