Adams, Douglas
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
(…)
I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.
(…)
Am I the only one who finds the expression “it turns out” to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors “I read somewhere that…” or the craven “they say that…” because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it is research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight. Anyway, where was I?
(…)
The following morning the weather was so foul it hardly deserved the name, and Dirk decided to call it Stanley instead.
(…)
“If the telly is to be believed, all cabbies ever do,” continued the cabbie, “is follow other cabbies. (…) Which leaves me in a very strange position, as being the one cabbie that never gets asked to follow another cabbie. Which leads me to the unmistakable conclusion that i must be the cabbie all the other cabbies are following.
(…)
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.”
— From: Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt : Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.
— From: Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
