Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 4
Quotes from work
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is a 1988 humorous fantasy detective novel by Douglas Adams. It is the second book by Adams featuring private detective Dirk Gently, the first being Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. The title is a phrase that appeared in Adams' novel Life, the Universe and Everything to describe the wretched boredom of immortal being Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged, and is a play on the theological treatise Dark Night of the Soul, by Saint John of the Cross.
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 4
“Dirk was unused to making such a minuscule impact on anybody.”
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 6
Context: Dirk was unused to making such a minuscule impact on anybody. He checked to be sure that he did have his huge leather coat and his absurd red hat on and that he was properly and dramatically silhouetted by the light of the doorway.
He felt momentarily deflated and said, "Er..." by way of self-introduction, but it didn't get the boy's attention. He didn't like this. The kid was deliberately and maliciously watching television at him.
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 1
Context: It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
“I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be.”
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 13
Context: My own strategy is to find a car, or the nearest equivalent, which looks as if it knows where it's going and follow it. I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be.
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
“I've had the sort of day that would make St. Francis of Assisi kick babies.”
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
“People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.”
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 14
Context: What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? 'Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'
I reject that entirely. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 23
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 17
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
