# Quote — Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

> If you'd like to know, I can tell you that in your universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and there's all sort of stuff going on in dimensions thirteen to twenty-two that you really wouldn't want to know about. All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place. I can easily not say words like "damn" if it offends you.

- Author: [Douglas Adams](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams.md)
- Book: [Mostly Harmless](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/mostly-harmless.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Chapter_17) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/mostly-harmless/if-youd-like

## More from this book

> The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/mostly-harmless/the-last-time.md)

> The thing they wouldn't be expecting him to do was to be there in the first place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, so he was winning already. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/mostly-harmless/the-thing-they.md)

> One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/mostly-harmless/one-of-the.md)