Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

For the past few months we’ve been populating our blog index with Quote of the Day entries featuring clever maxims from clever chaps and gals from all epochs and meridians. Deep, insightful, motivational, inspirational, sad, happy quotes. But never one that’s just plain funny.

Today’s quip is from The Salmon of Doubt, a posthumous collection of published and unpublished material by English writer by Douglas Adams.

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

I giggled for two minutes straight when I first read it, having just missed a deadline myself. I wasn’t too proud about it, but we’ve all been there, so it’s easy to relate to Adams’ discern.

His best known work is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a book that sits on the recommended-reading list of several famous entrepreneurs. The comedy science fiction series originally started as a BBC radio show in 1978. It later fledged into several books that sold over 15 million copies through the author’s lifetime. The series also generated a television program, spawned a few stage plays, and even ended up in comics, video games, and finally in a feature film.

Douglas died of a heart attack on May 11, 2001, aged 49. According to reports, the stroke occurred as he was resting from his regular workout at a private gym in Montecito, California. It was later determined that the cause of the stroke was a gradual narrowing of the coronary arteries, of which Douglas had not been aware.