01c. 1976 ADWhy should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
02c. 1976 ADI certainly don’t like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the one we’ve invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they’ve invented in America, who supply their servants with toupees, television stations, and, most important, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
03c. 1976 ADAn island, on the other hand, is small. There are fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled [..] So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight - the locals wouldn't stand a chance.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
04c. 1976 ADYes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do."The sign read:"Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.""It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
05c. 1976 ADThere are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
07c. 1976 ADA life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
08c. 1976 ADWords used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
10c. 1976 ADIt was his subconscious which told him this---that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
11c. 1976 ADRather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
13c. 1976 ADOne of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
14c. 1976 ADOne of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem about changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
15c. 1976 ADThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "future perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
16c. 1976 ADDon't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
17c. 1976 ADMany words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in some extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is seen as evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personalityDouglas Adams / quote ↗
19c. 1976 ADAdams has done a bit of everything, from radio to television to designing computer games. Not all of them worked out. “These are life’s little learning experiences,” he said. “You know what a learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’ “At the end of all this being-determined-to-be-a-jack-of-all-trades, I think I’m better off just sitting down and putting a hundred thousand words in a cunning order.” Adams writes “slowly and painfully.” “People assume you sit in a room, looking pensive and writing great thoughts,” he said. “But you mostly sit in a room looking panic-stricken and hoping they haven’t put a guard on the door yet.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
20c. 1976 ADThe light was only just visible - except of course that there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
21c. 1976 ADHe let the curtain drop and the terrible light that had played on his features went off to play somewhere more healthy.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
22c. 1976 ADI'm very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic' refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson."Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson?No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
23c. 1976 ADThis planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
24c. 1976 ADDavid Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
