It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families' pasts, don't include our non-European ancestors.
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.
ESPN has this problem with sports, it's impossible to fill 24 hours with sports programming so they have to resort to things like poker and arm wrestling tournaments.
Naming my favorite books feels like naming a favorite child - impossible.
Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible.
It would be impossible to be a woman in Western culture and not have your own issues about your image and what you look like.
Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.
I'm living to the edges of my fingernails, using everything I have. It's impossible for me to look at things politically or in any way as a project, to further my career. You're injected directly into the blood of the places in which you're living and what's going on there.
So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it.
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
When I turned 11, we had to leave East Germany overnight because of the political orientation of my father. Now I was going to school in West Germany, which was American-occupied at that time. There in school, all children were required to learn English and not Russian. To learn Russian had been difficult, but English was impossible for me.
We will never accomplish what God wants for our lives unless we stop making excuses for ourselves and pampering our flesh. When we get into seemingly impossible situations, we have to remember - it's not about us.
For the Yupik, all life was continuous, animal with human with 'spirit', and recognising that continuum allowed them to undergo transformations that we, locked into our own disappointingly Cartesian skins, find impossible even to imagine.
We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.
Well, no. I believe that it's not at all impossible that some of the performances that I've heard so far by some pianists may be superior to my own playing because those are two totally different acts altogether.
And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
If you look closely you can see that they are all interconnected, symbolic of a never-ending circle in which it is simply impossible for the dog to catch the rabbit.
That's the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You're left, stuck, in the studio. And that's a shame. You're making a movie. You don't want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie - to move.
Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.
The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.
I believe in the impossible because no one else does.
One thing I was thinking about the other day was you can't even conceive of the kinds of things you can do in movies today. The idea that you could draw, in a computer, dinosaurs and have them running around was totally impossible.
Faith is the first factor in a life devoted to service. Without it, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.
There are very few things impossible in themselves; and we do not want means to conquer difficulties so much as application and resolution in the use of means.
In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.
Innovation must lead infrastructure for a simple but compelling reason: Innovation produces new types of products and markets, and it is virtually impossible to know how to run those markets efficiently before they are created.
Once we truly grasp the message of the 'New Testament', it is impossible to read the 'Old Testament' again without seeing Christ on every page, in every story, foreshadowed or anticipated in every event and narrative.
Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
The difference is that with fame comes a spotlight, one which has recently made it impossible to ignore the fact that more and more of those folks we place on pedestals aren't even pausing to consider an option other than lying.
The most obvious characteristic of science is its application: the fact that, as a consequence of science, one has a power to do things. And the effect this power has had need hardly be mentioned. The whole industrial revolution would almost have been impossible without the development of science.
When people tell me I'm an artist, I say, 'What?' It's impossible for me to take the idea seriously.
Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along.
Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.
In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?) and headed off to grad school.
It is impossible to fight bullies merely by saying they're going too far.
