Top 400 Douglas Adams Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression “it turns out” to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is.”

— Douglas Adams

352. “Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.”

— Douglas Adams

353. “Richard stared in disbelief. “You say there’s a horse in your bathroom, and all you can do is stand there naming Beatles songs?”

— Douglas Adams

354. “Well, let us say inexplicable. There is no point in using the word “impossible” to describe something that has clearly happened. But it cannot be explained by anything we know.”

— Douglas Adams

355. “The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.”

— Douglas Adams

356. “Ah. Now there you’re asking. The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis. Not only is the continuum like a human body, it is also very like a piece of badly put up wallpaper. Push down a bubble somewhere, another one pops up somewhere else. There are no more dodos because of my interference. In the end I imposed the rule on myself because I simply couldn’t bear it any more. The only thing that really gets hurt when you try and change time is yourself.” He smiled bleakly and looked away.”

— Douglas Adams

357. “It’s like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo, and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.”

— Douglas Adams

358. “In fact, he had always done the bare minimum of research necessary to support these myths. He was lazy, and essentially what he did was allow people’s enthusiastic credulity to do the work for him.”

— Douglas Adams

359. “Lots of people are not in the business you think they’re in. Xerox, for instance, is in the business of selling toner cartridges. All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audience, they’re in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers.”

— Douglas Adams

360. “Well, you’re obviously being totally naive, of course,’ said the girl. ‘When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have you’ll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.”

— Douglas Adams

361. “Gordon Way, brother of Susan, employer of Richard MacDuff, was a rich man, the founder and owner of WayForward Technologies II. WayForward Technologies itself had of course gone bust, for the usual reason, taking his entire first fortune with it.”

— Douglas Adams

362. “Therefore we must be mad.’ ‘Nice day for it.”

— Douglas Adams

363. “It is said that there is nothing surprising about the notion of, for instance, a person suddenly thinking about someone they haven’t thought about for years, and then discovering the next day that the person has in fact just died.”

— Douglas Adams

364. “I agree,” he said. “You have a horse in your bathroom, and I will, after all, have a little port.”

— Douglas Adams

365. “Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is “Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? Because you’re not!”

— Douglas Adams

366. “He instituted this, er, Chair of Chronology to see if there was any particular reason why one thing happened after another and if there was any way of stopping it. Since the answers to the three questions were, I knew immediately, yes, no, and maybe, I realized I could then take the rest of my career off.”

— Douglas Adams

367. “Odd,” agreed Reg. “I’ve certainly never come across any irreversible mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field.”

— Douglas Adams

368. “The Norse God of Thunder looked at her awkwardly. He had to remove his great horned helmet because it was banging against the ceiling and leaving scratch marks in the plaster.”

— Douglas Adams

369. “Well, I’ve found the answer. Forgive me if you knew this already, perhaps I’m the last person in the world to find this out. Anyway, the answer is this: you grip the palmtop between both hands and you type with your thumbs. Seriously. It works.”

— Douglas Adams

370. “The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly restlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape from a sack. His own age was on the older side of completely indeterminate. If.”

— Douglas Adams

371. “I did better than that. I called in a neighbour’s kid who used to be able to solve Rubik’s cube in seventeen seconds. He sat on a step and stared at it for over an hour before pronouncing it irrevocably stuck.”

— Douglas Adams

372. “Did you know, young lady,” said Watkin to her, “that the Book of Revelation was written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John the Divine, as you know. To me it shows very clear signs of having been written while waiting for a ferry. Oh, yes, I think so. It starts off, doesn’t it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you’re killing time, getting bored, you know, just making things up, and then gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair.”

— Douglas Adams

373. “That isn’t to say that if you get involved in a paradox a few things won’t strike you as being very odd, but if you’ve got through life without that already happening to you, then I don’t know which Universe you’ve been living in, but it isn’t this one.”

— Douglas Adams

374. “Shall I leave the window open or would you like to try the door?” she said with a sniff.”

— Douglas Adams

375. “What did “psychosassic” mean? It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all.”

— Douglas Adams

376. “The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

— Douglas Adams

377. “She remembered wondering what it was that the Albanians exported in such an anonymous way, but when on one occasion she had looked it up, she found that their only export was electricity – which, if she remembered her high school physics correctly, was unlikely to be moved around in lorries.”

— Douglas Adams

378. “Now. Having saved the entire human race from extinction I could do with a pizza. What say you to such a proposal?”

— Douglas Adams

379. “Not content with ignoring the normal requirements of biology, the cat was also in clear breach of the laws of physics.”

— Douglas Adams

380. “She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.”

— Douglas Adams

381. “Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion.”

— Douglas Adams

382. “The daylight shouldered its way in like a squad of policemen and did a lot of what’s-all-thising around the room, which, like the bedroom, would have presented anyone of an aesthetic disposition with difficulties.”

— Douglas Adams

383. “The mail on the doormat consisted of the usual things: a rude letter threatening to take away his American Express card, an invitation to apply for an American Express card, and a few bills of the more hysterical and unrealistic type.”

— Douglas Adams

384. “The socially correct way of pouring tea is to put the milk in after the tea. Social correctness has traditionally had nothing whatever to do with reason, logic, or physics. In fact, in England it is generally considered socially incorrect to know stuff or think about things. It’s worth bearing this in mind when visiting.”

— Douglas Adams

385. “Because the air was thick with animal hair and dust, my nose was continually inflamed and runny, and every fifteen seconds I would sneeze. Any thought I could not explore, develop, and bring to some logical conclusion within fifteen seconds would therefore be forcibly expelled from my head, along with a great deal of mucus.”

— Douglas Adams

386. “Plenty of people didn’t care for him much, but there is a huge difference between disliking somebody – maybe even disliking them a lot – and actually shooting them, strangling them, dragging them through the fields and setting their house on fire. It was a difference which kept the vast majority of the population alive from day to day.”

— Douglas Adams

387. “His job was to push them open for us. He explained that this had become necessary because unfortunately the doors didn’t open automatically when you approached them, and some of their Japanese visitors would often just stand in front of them for whole minutes getting increasingly bewildered and panic-stricken until someone slid them open by hand.”

— Douglas Adams

388. “Life’, said Marvin, ’don’t talk to me about life.”

— Douglas Adams

389. “One, a young man, was tall, thin and angular; even muffled inside a heavy dark coat he walked a little like an affronted heron. The.”

— Douglas Adams

390. “It may not be terribly important that from five thousand miles away you can reach into a university corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can, but it’s the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating. So that, I think, is the fourth age of sand.”

— Douglas Adams

391. “First you had to fight the Stones fans, which was tricky because they fought dirty and had their knuckles nearer the ground.”

— Douglas Adams

392. “It meant that the silently waged conflict between himself and his cleaning lady had escalated to a new and more frightening level. It was now, Dirk reckoned, fully three months since this fridge door had been opened, and each of them was grimly determined not to be the one to open it first.”

— Douglas Adams

393. “Between you and me, sir, I would’ve been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them.”

— Douglas Adams

394. “The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors.”

— Douglas Adams

395. “Any time you see a film or TV show or a commercial that features someone dressed up as an animal, it’s probably Todd inside. “I was in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” he told me. “Guess,” he added, “which one I was.”

— Douglas Adams

396. “We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do.”

— Douglas Adams

397. “This Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition is a highly significant one in the history of Introductions. Its presence on these pages means that this book has achieved the World Record for the Number of Introductions in a Book of This Nature.”

— Douglas Adams

398. “There had been a nasty moment when his life had flashed before his eyes but he had been too preoccupied with falling and had missed all the good bits.”

— Douglas Adams

399. “This was a public telephone so it was clearly an oversight that it was working at all.”

— Douglas Adams

400. “For the next two weeks I took up playing in the traffic, being careless with kitchen knives, and neglecting to stand clear of the doors on station platforms, but, sadly, I led a charmed life, and I had to go through with it: four weeks of the greatest humiliation and embarrassment known to man or, rather, to that most easily humiliated and embarrassed of all creatures, the overgrown twelve-year-old boy.”

— Douglas Adams