It has been quite sometime since I promised myself to give tribute to a man who epitomizes literary humour. Yes, I am talking about Douglas Adams, the man who gave us the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything . He is one of the few writers whose writing style I adore the most. Others would be Tolkien, R K Narayanan, Samule Backett, Bill Waterson, Scott Adams (joined my favorite list in the past couple of years only) but one blog is too less to write about all of them. In this blog, I am writing only on Douglas Adams and as a tribute to this legen....(wait for it)...dary writer, I am putting few of his famous quotes here:
- Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it?
- If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.
- The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth – when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass – the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another – particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.
- I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
- Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
- Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen happens again. All of this, however, doesn't necessarily happen in chronological order.
- "Life! Don't talk to me about life." (Marvin)
- "What to do if you find yourself stuck with no hope of rescue: Consider yourself lucky that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your present circumstances seems more likely, consider yourself lucky that it won't be troubling you much longer."
- It's funny how just when you think life just can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does. (Marvin)
- Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it. (Marvin)
- There is a theory which states that if anybody ever discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
- I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
- In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
- In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
- The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
- You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
- Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
- He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
- Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
- The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
- Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
- The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second-rate technology, who led them into it in the first place.
- Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash form point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all decide where the hell they wanted to be.
