Source: The Salmon of Doubt
Quotes from book
The Salmon of Doubt
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time is a posthumous collection of previously published and unpublished material by Douglas Adams. It consists largely of essays about technology and life experiences, but its major selling point is the inclusion of the incomplete novel on which Adams was working at the time of his death, The Salmon of Doubt .
The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
“Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
Context: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
“The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them.”
Source: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
“I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!)”
The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
Context: 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.
Douglas Adams. The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time. New York: Random House, 2002, 135–136.
Also quoted by Richard Dawkins in his Eulogy for Douglas Adams (17 September 2001) http://www.edge.org/documents/adams_index.html
Context: If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
“I love deadlines. I like the whoosing sound they make as they fly by.”
Variant: I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
Source: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
“I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.”
Source: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
Variant: A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.
Source: Interview in The Daily Nexus (5 April 2000), reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt
“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”
Source: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
Source: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
Context: My favorite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done. This is not quite true, in fact. 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.
Source: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
