Home > Work > Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1)
1 " Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. "
― Douglas Adams , Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1)
2 " Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. "
3 " You mean you've been in this same set of rooms here for... two hundred years?' murmured Richard. 'You'd think someone would notice, or think it was odd.''Oh, that's one of the delights of the older Cambridge colleges,' said Reg, 'everyone is so discreet. If we all went around mentioning what was odd about each other we'd be here till Christmas. "
4 " There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened. "
5 " 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. "
6 " If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there? "
7 " Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see. "
8 " Gilks sighed. ‘You’re a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that,’ he said, ‘but you make the samemistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid. "
9 " She tried to worry that something terrible had happened to him, but didn't believe it for a moment. Nothing terrible ever happened to him, though she was beginning to think that it was time it damn well did. If nothing terrible happened to him soon maybe she'd do it herself. Now there was an idea. "
10 " The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn't ring. Or the phone. "
11 " 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. "
12 " the only thing that really gets hurt when you try and change time is yourself. "
13 " I commend you on your skepticism, but even the skeptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. 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 Anatidæ on our hands. "
14 " 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. "
15 " Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. "
16 " The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder... Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. "
17 " It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too. "
18 " In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or extinction, one thing has never been in doubt - that you would at least know the answer when you were dead. "
19 " That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herself that that was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final real ulimate it. "
20 " The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis. "