Thursday, January 13, 2011

The Genius of Douglas Adams

So rich in it's humor, and it's wonder, that even Wikiquote gives him a featured Google link. (that is a big deal, right?) :::shrugs:::

Enjoy.
  • "I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
  • "The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
New words, according to The Meaning of Liff (1983)
  1. AALST (n.) One who changes his name to be further to the front
  2. ABOYNE (vb.) To beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him.
  3. CLIXBY (adj.) Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly uninformative.
  4. FAIRYMOUNT (vb. n.) Polite word for buggery.
  5. LAXOBIGGING (ptcpl.vb.) Struggling to extrude an extremely large turd.
  6. SHOEBURYNESS (abs.n.) The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from somebody else's bottom
  7. WOKING (vb.) To enter the kitchen with the precise determination to perform something only to forget what it is just before you do it.
  • "You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot."
  • "If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands"
  • "Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it."
  • "I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer."
  • "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks."
  • (on suffering a bout with writer's block) "The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to."
  • "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
  • "It 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."
  • "If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don’t. It’s like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt it. Not even major surgery if it’s done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make."
  • "What, really, is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"

Good question.

1 comment:

Electerik said...

Very nice! I especially like: "A nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones."