Douglas Adams

“The first I knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday. I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no, he'd come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me.""But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.""Oh yes, well, as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.""But the plans were on display...""On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.""That's the display department.""With a flashlight.""Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.""So had the stairs.""But look, you found the notice didn't you?""Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.”

“Eight hours West sat a man alone on a beach mourning an inexplicable loss. He could only think of his loss in little packets of grief at a time, because the whole thing was too great to be borne.”

“[...]he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words Don't Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitch hiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.”

“You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot.”

“Being virtually killed by a virtual laser in a virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.”

“Shh!" said Ford. "It's conical. So what you do is, you see, you fill it with fine white sand, alright? Or sugar. Fine white sand, and/or sugar. Anything. Doesn't matter. Sugar's fine. And when it's full, you pull the plug out... are you listening?" "I'm listening." "You pull the plug out, and it all just twirls away, twirls away you see, out of the plughole. "Clever." "That's not the clever bit. This is the clever bit, I remember now that this is the clever bit. The clever bit is that you then thread the film in the projector... backwards!" "Backwards?" "Yes. Threading it backwards is definitely the clever bit. So then, you just sit and watch it, and everything just appears to spiral upwards out of the plughole and fill the bath. See?" "And that's how the Universe began is it?" said Arthur. "No," said Ford, "but it's a marvelous way to relax.”

“He was following the Earth through its days, drifting with the rhythms of its myriad pulses, seeping through the webs of its life, swelling with its tides, turning with its weight.”

“Sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away.”

“You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”

“He had been told that when looking for a good oracle, it was best to find the oracle that other oracles went to.”

“Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins.”

“POPULATION: None. It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.”

“The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it’s just wonderful. And … the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.”

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

“If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.”

“great book stands the test of time unlike my good self.........”

“It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass.”

“I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no he'd come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me.”

“Beyinlerinin bu karanlık ve kilitli köşelerinden kurtulabilmeyi isterdi, çünkü burada saklı olanlar arada sırada bir an için yüzeye çıkıyor, zihninin neşe ve eğlence bölümünü tuhaf düşüncelerle doldurarak, kendisini hayatının temel görevi olarak gördüğü şeyden, yani harika bir şekilde iyi zaman geçirmekten alıkoymaya çalışıyorlardı.”

“Bütün bu geldiğim yol, diye düşünüyordu Zaphod, bütün bu belalar, bütün bu plajda-yan-gelip-yatıp-harika-vakit-geçirememeler, peki ama ne için?”

“Holy Zarquon, did I ask for an existentialist elevator?”

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”

“The Googleplex Star Thinker is a super-computer from the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity and has the ability to calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle during a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard.The Deep Thought computer call it a pocket calculator in comparison to itself.”

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

“I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.“But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.“But it’s burnt down?”“Yes.”“Twice.”“Many times.”“And rebuilt.”“Of course. It is an important and historic building.”“With completely new materials.”“But of course. It was burnt down.”“So how can it be the same building?”“It is always the same building.”I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.”

“The mice will see you now," he said.”

“Bir gün, bizim genç Zaphod bu gemilerden birine baskın yapmaya karar verdi. Stratosferde kullanmak üzere tasarlanmış, üç-jetli küçük bir motosiklete binmiş küçük bir çocuk. Yani bu yaptığı delirmiş bir maymunun yapabileceğinden daha çılgıncaydı. Ben de onunla gittim, çünkü bunu yapamayacağı üzerine sağlam bir parayla bahse girmiştim ve sahte delillerle geri dönmesini istemiyordum. Sonra ne mi oldu? Motorunu güçlendirip bambaşka bir şeye çevirdiği üç-jetli motosiklete atladık, birkaç hafta içinde dokuz on ışık yılı yol aldık, nasıl olduğunu hala bilmediğim bir şekilde mega yük gemisine daldık, oyuncak tabancalarımızı sallayarak kumanda köprüsüne çıktık ve at kestanesi istedik. Şimdiye kadar bundan daha çılgınca bir şeye rastlamadım. Bir yıllık harçlığıma mal olmuştu. Ne için? At kestanesi.”

“Something pink? Something with extra Vitamin B? Vitamin B12? B13? Just the number of things with different types of Vitamin B in them was an embarrassment of choice itself. There were powders as well as oils, tubes of gel, even packets of some kind of pungent -smelling seed that was meant to be good for some obscure part of you in some arcane way.”

“She felt faintly embarrassed by the sheer profusion of things she had for putting in baths, but she was for some reason incapable of passing any chemist’s or herb shop without going in to be seduced by some glass-stoppered bottle of something blue or green or orange or oily that was supposed to restore the natural balance of some vague substance she didn’t even know she was supposed to have in her pores.”

“You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy's a fun place. You'll need to have this fish in your ear.”

“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.”

“something almost, but not quite entirely unlike tea”

“You'll have a national Philosopher's strike on your hands!”

“For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here.”

“Trillian did a little research in the ship's copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness. "Go to it," it said, "and good luck.”

“Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.”

“There is a particular disdain with which Siamese cats regard you. Anyone who has walked in on the Queen cleaning her teeth will be familiar with the feeling.”

“I think he probably wants you to play Scrabble with him again,' said Ford, 'he's pointing to the letters.''Probably spelt crzjgrdwldiwdc again, I keep on telling him there's only one g in crzjgrdwldiwdc.”

“Ford was beginning to behave rather strangely, or rather not actually beginning to behave strangely but beginning to behave in a way that was strangely different from the other strange ways in which he more regularly behaved.”

“He had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his method of “Zen” navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both.”

“The Great Zaganza said: "You are very fat and stupid and persistently wear a ridiculous hat which you should be ashamed of.”

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

“Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn't him.”

“Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day.”

“When the girl sitting at the next table looked away from a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened.”

“Tutto quel che, in qualsiasi forma, vedi, senti o provi è specifico di te. Tu crei un universo percependolo, sicché tutto quanto percepisci dell'universo è specifico di te”

“Non puoi vedere quel che vedo io perché vedi quel che vedi. Non puoi sapere quel che so io perché sai quel che sai. Quel che io vedo e so non si può aggiungere a quel che vedi e sai tu, perché le due cose non sono dello stesso tipo. Né quel che che vedo e do io può sostituire quel che vedi e sai tu, perché questo significherebbe sostituire te stesso.”

“The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their writhings, a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, whilst the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck anyway, and certainly not whilst it, the second duck, was busy flying.”

“If you've done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”

“La storia di tutte le maggiori civiltà galattiche tende ad attraversare tre fasi distinte e ben riconoscibili, ovvero le fasi della Sopravvivenza, della Riflessione e della Decadenza, altrimenti dette fasi del Come, del Perché e del Dove.“La prima frase, per esempio, è caratterizzata dalla domanda ‘Come facciamo a procurarci da mangiare?’, la seconda dalla domanda ‘Perché mangiamo?’ e la terza dalla domanda ‘In quale ristorante pranziamo oggi?’.”