Top 400 Douglas Adams Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “MacDuff I knew at Cambridge.” “Oh, you did, did you? Describe him.” “Tall. Tall and absurdly thin. And good-natured. A bit like a preying mantis that doesn’t prey – a non-preying mantis if you like. A sort of pleasant genial mantis that’s given up preying and taken up tennis instead.”

— Douglas Adams

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Douglas Adams

409. “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

410. “Why?’ is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it.”

— Douglas Adams

411. “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

412. “She was about to demand a full and instant explanation of this preposterous remark when a passing white Ford Sierra slowed down beside them. The driver wound down the window and leaned out. “Had a crash then?” he shouted at them. “Yes.” “Ha!” he said and drove on.”

— Douglas Adams

413. “Wandering around the Web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science-fiction devices that deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact it isn’t like it, it is it. Trying to work out all the implications of this is as difficult as it was for early filmmakers to work out all the implications of being able to move the camera.”

— Douglas Adams

414. “The stories had claimed that people in the area had been “terrorized” by some repulsively deformed “goblinlike” creature who regularly broke out of the Woodshead and committed an impressively wide range of unspeakable acts.”

— Douglas Adams

415. “So what we have arrived at here – and although the first shock wave of this arrival was in 1859, it’s really the arrival of the computer that demonstrates it unarguably to us – is “Is there really a universe that is not designed from the top downward, but from the bottom upward? Can complexity emerge from lower levels of simplicity?”

— Douglas Adams

416. “I guess when the novel started, most early novels were just sort of pornography: Apparently, most media actually started as pornography and sort of grew from there. This is not a pornographic CD-ROM, I hasten to add.”

— Douglas Adams

417. “Bianchi lenzuoli irlandesi, appena inamidati, puliti, stirati, ben rimboccati – questi aggettivi erano per lui come una litania di desiderio. Da secoli nulla l’aveva attratto come ora le lenzuola. Non riusciva assolutamente a concepire come si potesse desiderare qualcos’altro. Lenzuola. E dormire. Dormire e lenzuola. Dormire nelle lenzuola. Dormire.”

— Douglas Adams

418. “It was odd, Kate reflected, that people who needed to bully you were the easiest to push around.”

— Douglas Adams

419. “In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time and had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that wants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will lend it some.”

— Douglas Adams

420. “He put some more cold pizza into his face.”

— Douglas Adams

421. “Of course, the computer isn’t any of these things. These are all things we were previously familiar with from the real world, which we have modelled in the computer so that we can use the damn thing. Which should tell us something interesting. The computer is actually a modelling device.”

— Douglas Adams

422. “The man, he believed with an instant effortlessness which would have impressed even a Scientologist, must be a God of some kind to arouse such fervour.”

— Douglas Adams

423. “That is the first thing anybody has said to me for seventeen years, three months and two days, five hours, nineteen minutes and twenty seconds. I’ve been counting.” He.”

— Douglas Adams

424. “He decided to feel sorry for himself. That would pass the time.”

— Douglas Adams

425. “It seems odd, don’t you think, that the quality of the food should vary inversely with the brightness of the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinary heights the kitchen staff could rise to if you confined them to perpetual darkness.”

— Douglas Adams

426. “The Monk currently believed that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including the Monk itself and the Monk’s horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink.”

— Douglas Adams

427. “Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i – “Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i – “Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i –.”

— Douglas Adams

428. “Svlad Cjelli. Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, “popular” was hardly right. Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculated about, those too were true. But popular? Only in the sense that a serious accident on the motorway might be popular – everyone slows down to have a good look, but no one will get too close to the flames. Infamous was more like it. Svlad Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk.”

— Douglas Adams

429. “Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul.”

— Douglas Adams

430. “She had nearly said, “Over what?,” but at that moment she realized that if she said that she would have to listen to his reply, which would be bound to infuriate her into arguing back. It occurred to her for the first time that the only way of escaping was just not to get drawn into these arguments. If she simply did not respond this time, then she was free to leave. She tried it. She felt a sudden freedom. She left. A week later, in much the.”

— Douglas Adams

431. “The officer’s next point was that I wasn’t in the universe, I was in England, a point that has been made to me before.”

— Douglas Adams

432. “He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief?”

— Douglas Adams

433. “There was a distinct absence of anything female in the room – the same sort of absence that a missing picture leaves behind it on a wall.”

— Douglas Adams

434. “The theology of this seemed a little confused, reflected Dirk, but what was one tiny extra droplet of misinformation in such a raging torrent?”

— Douglas Adams

435. “A bit like a preying mantis that doesn’t prey – a non-preying mantis if you like.”

— Douglas Adams

436. “The phone wavered in Richard’s hand. He was holding it about half an inch away from his ear anyway because it seemed that somebody had dipped the earpiece in some chow mein recently, but that wasn’t so bad. It was a public telephone so it was clearly an oversight that it was working at all.”

— Douglas Adams

437. “The little book of instructions suggested that he should simply concentrate ‘soulfully’ on the question which was ‘besieging’ him, write it down, ponder on it, enjoy the silence, and then once he had achieved inner harmony and tranquillity he should push the red button. There wasn’t a red button, but there was a blue button marked ‘Red’, and this Dirk took to be the one.”

— Douglas Adams

438. “Wandering around the Web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science-fiction devices that deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact it isn’t like it, it is it.”

— Douglas Adams

439. “He had, of course, long ago taken the precaution of removing the only extant copies of the books on his reading list from the university and college libraries, as a result of which he had plenty of time to, well, to do whatever it was he did.”

— Douglas Adams

440. “You see what I have done?′ he asked the ceiling, which seemed to flinch slightly at being yanked so suddenly into the conversation.”

— Douglas Adams

441. “Very strange people, physicists,” he said as soon as they were outside again. “In my experience the ones who aren’t actually dead are in some way very ill.”

— Douglas Adams

442. “Big, bulbous, ruddy buildings with vast ballrooms, grand, angular staircases, and as many turrets and crenellations as a recreational condom. The.”

— Douglas Adams