The Douglas Adams memorial thread: Post your favorite quotes here!

[Shirley_Ujest]

I’ve never heard of Doug Adams. After reading this thread, I think I am going to check into some of his works.

[Rayne_Man]

*Originally posted by Shirley Ujest *
**I’ve never heard of Doug Adams. After reading this thread, I think I am going to check into some of his works. **

If you can ,try to catch the tapes of the original “Hitchikers Guide To The Universe” BBC radio series.I think that these radio are much funnier than either the TV series or the books. Just one good situation after another.

[Moe]

Shirley definitely go out and get yourself a copy of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide…” (personally, I found the books to be funnier than the radio show or the tv show, but in any form DA is so brilliantly funny).

My contribution:
“If you’ve done 6 impossible things today, why not round it off with dinner at the Milliways?”

[Saltire]

“Reg…had a memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly, in that it was colorful, flitted prettily hither and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct.”

[jmullaney]

It’s kind of ironic that his last lecture series was about Napster and the like, as I downloaded Hitchhiker’s off of gnutella last week. Now where am I supposed to send my micropayment?

I first read the series when I was ten. Hadn’t read Hitchhiker’s in a decade. Still makes me laugh.

Quotes:

 This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most  of

the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions
were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned
with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on
the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And, my favorite exchange between Ford and Arthur:

 Arthur was still lying in the curve of the floor where he had fallen.

He didn’t look up. He just lay panting.
“We’re trapped now aren’t we?”
“Yes,” said Ford, “we’re trapped.”
“Well didn’t you think of anything? I thought you said you were going
to think of something. Perhaps you thought of something and didn’t
notice.”
“Oh yes, I thought of something,” panted Ford. Arthur looked up
expectantly.
“But unfortunately,” continued Ford, “it rather involved being on the
other side of this airtight hatchway.” He kicked the hatch they’d just
been through.
“But it was a good idea was it?”
“Oh yes, very neat.”
“What was it?”
“Well I hadn’t worked out the details yet. Not much point now is
there?”
“So… er, what happens next?”
“Oh, er, well the hatchway in front of us will open automatically in
a few moments and we will shoot out into deep space I expect and
asphyxicate. If you take a lungful of air with you you can last for up to
thirty seconds of course…” said Ford. He stuck his hands behind his
back, raised his eyebrows and started to hum an old Betelgeusian battle
hymn. To Arthur’s eyes he suddenly looked very alien.
“So this is it,” said Arthur, “we’re going to die.”
“Yes,” said Ford, “except… no! Wait a minute!” he suddenly lunged
across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision. “What’s
this switch?” he cried.
“What? Where?” cried Arthur twisting round.
“No, I was only fooling,” said Ford, “we are going to die after all.”
“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped
in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of
asphyxication in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my
mother told me when I was young.”
“Why, what did she tell you?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”
“Oh.” Ford carried on humming.

[Danimal]

Probably my all-time favorite scene is Number Two interrogating Ford and Arthur about what they want to drink.

Then also: “Come with me, or you will be late.”

“Late? For what?”

“Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent.”

Then the little scene from “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe” where the nuclear power companies are finally forced to admit they had nothing to do with the accident at all…

[Juniper200]

…as my copy of the More than Complete Guide fell apart and I’ve yet to buy a new one.

“How do you feel?”
“Like a military academy. Bits of me keep passing out.”
–Ford and Arthur, in the Dentrassi quarters
Thank you for everything, DNA. I never laughed out loud at a book before the Guide.

[Running_with_Scissors]

Oh man, oh man, oh man. I can’t believe DNA’s gone.

I first encountered HHGTTG on an NPR broadcast, probably in 1981 or so. A year or so later I found the books (that had been written so far) and have been obsessed ever since. Many good quotes have already been posted; I’ll leave one below from a lesser-known work, the short story Young Zaphod Plays it Safe:

Zaphod sighed a “what is the world coming to” sort of sigh to absolve himself from all blame, and swung himself round in his seat.
“Ship?” he called.
“Yup?” said the ship.
“Do what I do.”
The ship thought about this for a few milliseconds and then, after double checking all the seals on its heavy duty bulkheads, it began slowly, inexorably, in the hazy blaze of its lights, to sink to the lowest depths.

[dodge_this]

*Originally posted by David Cronan *
If you can ,try to catch the tapes of the original “Hitchikers Guide To The Universe” BBC radio series.

Minor hijack: I actually made a copy of the series when it was broadcast over the BBC in the mid 80s. Thanks for reminding me, I gotta go look for my tapes now.

Mark Wing Davey was great as Zaphod. And the ship’s computer singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ is a classic…

[Liberal]

"To judge another is to judge God."

— Marshall Stewart Ball, at age 7

[Rayne_Man]

I’m surprised that nobody has chosen “Ive got this terrible pain in all the diodes on my left side” and “The only friend I ever had was a rat . I’m sure he climbed inside my mechanism and died and is still there”

[Zanshin]

“You sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? Now there’s a frood who really know where his towel is.”

“I am so cool you could keep a side of beef in me for a month. I am so hip I have trouble seeing over my pelvis.”

Thanks, Douglas.

[GuanoLad]

“Several billion trillion megatons of superhot exploding hydrogen rose slowly above the horizon, and managed to look small, cold, and slightly damp…”

Definitely my favourite quote. Second, though, is this:

Zaphod to Marvin: “You know how women are! Hmm. Or perhaps you don’t. I assume you don’t. If you do, I don’t want to hear about it.”

[Phobos]

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