Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, scriptwriter, essayist, humorist, satirist and dramatist.
Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.
The big corporations are suddenly taking notice of the web, and their reactions have been slow. Even the computer industry failed to see the importance of the Internet, but that's not saying much. Let's face it, the computer industry failed to see that the century would end.
Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes our ends.
We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often "crash" when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I'm sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for "productivity"
Democracy is all about not electing the wrong man-eating lizard.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
I begged her, 'Please don't leave me stranded in the middle of some primitive zarking forest with no medical help and a head injury. I could be in serious trouble and so could she. '" "What did she say?" "She hit me on the head with the rock again," Ford responded curtly. "I think i can confirm that was my daughter. " "Sweet kid. " "You have to get to know her," said Arthur. "She eases up, does she?" "No, but you get a better sense of when to duck.
One always overcompensates for disabilities. I'm thinking of having my entire body surgically removed.
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 asphyxiation 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.
But for a moment Dirk had a sense of inifinite loss and sadness that somewhere among the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.
He inched his way up the corridor as if he would rather be yarding his way down it, which was true.
Here, for whatever reason, is the world. And here it stays. With me on it.
When the girl sitting at the next table looked away from a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened.
How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?
The 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.
I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style
Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.
We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.
Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.