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Famous Douglas Adams Quotes

“Stomp stomp. Whirr. Pleased to be of service. Shut up. Thank you. Stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp. Whirr. Thank you for making a simple door very happy. Hope your diodes rot. Thank you. Have a nice day. Stomp stomp stomp stomp. Whirr. It is my pleasure to open for you... Zark off. ...and my satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done. I said zark off. Thank you for listening to this message.”

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Book:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: A Trilogy in Four Parts
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“We're not obsessed by anything, you see," insisted Ford. "..." "And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win." "I care about lots of things," said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty. "Such as?" "Well," said the old man, "life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords." "Would you die for them?" "Fjords?" blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. "No." "Well then." "Wouldn't see the point, to be honest.”

MenWellsSaidCareDiesUniverseWinningVoiceHonestSurpriseObsessionFactorsBeing HonestUncertaintyObsessedOld ManI CareTremblingCan't WinAnnoyanceWell SaidFjords
Book:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: A Trilogy in Four Parts
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“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”

PeopleMenWorldYearsMadeTwoWould BeGirlNiceTreeThousandSittingOne ManBeing NiceThousand YearsThursdayHitchhikers GuideHappy PlaceHikerBe Nice To PeopleFord Prefect
Book:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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“And as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.”

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Book:So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
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“All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was." "No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”

MenWorldSaidFeelingsBigsUniverseStrangeNormalOld ManParanoiaSinisterPerfectly Normal
Book:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five
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“He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time he called them breakfast and ate them. Between them they killed a virulent space disease he'd picked up without knowing it in the Flargathon Gas Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise would have killed off half the population of the Western Hemisphere, blinded the other half, and driven everyone else psychotic and sterile, so the Earth was lucky there.”

MadeTwoEarthMovingThreeFoundSpaceHalfKnowingMinutesLuckyDiseaseWesternPopulationDrivenGasBreakfastPlatesOther HalfBlindedPsychoticSwampsHemisphereFridges
Book:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five
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“But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.”

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Book:So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
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“The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.”

KnowsWorldLittlesLeftRealizingKnow HowCarOffersComputerAvailableDevicesBalletSandwichesGrimToasters
Book:Mostly Harmless
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“Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.”

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Book:The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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“[The Head of Radio Three] had been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase "too much Mozart" was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy.”

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Author:Douglas Adams
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“Was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomability into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

ArtReasonWould BeFormDifficultBehindsGeniusAskingExtraordinaryNaiveMixturesNo PointIncompetence
Book:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: A Trilogy in Four Parts
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“When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard-driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidently change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your hood in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford Prefect off his.”

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Book:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: A Trilogy in Four Parts
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“If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. 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.”

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Book:Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
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