“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.”
Source: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
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Douglas Adams 317
English writer and humorist 1952–2001Related quotes

About General U.S. Grant, as quoted in The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln: A Narrative and Descriptive Biography http://www.granthomepage.com/grantgeneral.htm, by Francis Fisher Brown, p. 520
1860s

2010s, 2016, June, Speech about the Orlando Shooting (June 13, 2016)

Space (1912)
Context: Supposing you knew — not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition — that what we call empty space was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real — as real to the mind.

Source: Short fiction, Hardfought (1983), p. 63