Douglas Adams From Wikiquote Jump to: navigation search "The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them." Douglas Noel Adams 11 March 11 May ) was a British author and satirist, most famous for his The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of radio plays and books. See also: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Contents - The Meaning of Liff (1983)
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) ... edit Sourced - 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? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. at Digital Biota 2 , Cambridge, UK, 1998 As quoted in Richard Dawkins Eulogy for Douglas Adams 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. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
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