Impossibility - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

''There's no use trying,'' she said: ''one ca'n't believe impossible things.'' ''I daresay you haven't had much practice,'' said the Queen. ''When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.''

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872)

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it's done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Between Planets (1951)

As you've discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.

- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961)

A dear friend, a great scientist, now dead, used to tease me by saying that because politics is the art of the possible, it appeals only to second-rate minds. The first-raters, he claimed, were only interested in the impossible.

- Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (1979)

Let us leave this festering hellhole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us 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 (1987)

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.

- Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988)

First, something is inconceivable, and that means exactly that. You can't think about it, can't say yes or no because it is altogether taboo. Then there is the conceivable but deniable. At that point the inconceivable becomes just impossible, you see. Although you still deny it, now you can think of it, and it may return again and again, each time eroding the denial a little bit more until impossible becomes possible, something you can consider. That's how the system works.

- KateWilhelm, ''Isosceles'' (1988)

Wesley: He wants the impossible. La Forge: That's the short definition of ''captain.''

- Cliff Bole, ''The Ensigns of Command,'' episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1989)

''Impossible'' is a word that humans use far too often.

- Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky, ''Hope and Fear,'' episode of Star Trek: Voyager (1998)

The impossible is only barely less likely than the normal around here.

- Glen Cook, Angry Lead Skies (2002)