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21 " The Brigadier had no wish to shake hands with the improbable young man in the ridiculous frock-coat. "
― , Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead
22 " With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible. "
― Aristotle , Poetics
23 " Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence. "
― John Kenneth Galbraith
24 " Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?...Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening... Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different? "
― Annie Dillard , For the Time Being
25 " Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities. "
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26 " Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible. "
― Rod Serling
27 " Through the eyes of men an utterly irrational birth followed by a terribly improbable execution are miscues of the most pathetic sort. And all I can say is that I’m immeasurably thankful that I’ve been given access to the eyes of God. "
― Craig D. Lounsbrough
28 " As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless. "
― Colson Whitehead , Sag Harbor
29 " What is important is to understand the true boundaries of reality, not the probable boundaries of possible future events. Although boundary conditions operate on the future, they are probabilistic constraints, not absolutely determined fact. We assume that ten minutes hence, the room we are in will still exist. It is a boundary condition that will define the next ten minutes in our space/time coordinate. But we cannot know who will be in the room ten minutes hence; that is free to be determined. One may ask if we can really know that the room will exist at any future moment. This is where induction enters the picture, since in truth we cannot know with certainty. There is no absolutely rigorous way of establishing that. But we can make the inductive leap of faith that has to do with accumulated experience. We project that the existence of the room will remain a boundary condition, but in principle in the next ten minutes there could be an earthquake and this building might not be left standing. However, for that to happen, the boundary condition will have to be radically disrupted in some unexpected and improbable manner. What is so curious is that such a thing could occur. "
― Terence McKenna , True Hallucinations
30 " Storylines from fiction always seem inherently improbable to occur in real life, yet when we read them we are happy to suspend our disbelief, which may simply suggest that in our everyday lives we have an irrational craving for certainty and probability. "
31 " It's fiction, the improbable is very probable in my worlds "
― H.Q. Frost
32 " The writer's characters must stand before us with a wonderful clarity, such continuous clarity that nothing they do strikes us as improbable behavior for just that character, even when the character's action is, as sometimes happens, something that came as a surprise to the writer himself. We must understand, and the writer before us must understand, more than we know about the character; otherwise neither the writer nor the reader after him could feel confident of the character's behavior when the character acts freely. "
― John Gardner , The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
33 " No fiction is good fiction unless it is true to life, and yet no life is worth relating unless it be a life out of the ordinary; and then it seems improbable like fiction. "
34 " Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain. "
35 " What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn't there. "
― Malcolm Lowry , Under the Volcano
36 " Always plan no matter how improbable it seems. . The bill for hindsight is much more expensive than the reciept for foresight. "
37 " There is beauty everywhere on earth, but there is greater beauty in those places where one feels that sense of ease which comes from no longer having to put off one’s dreams until some improbable future – a future inexorably shrinking away; where the fear that has pervaded one’s life suddenly vanishes because there is... nothing to be afraid of. "
― Josef Škvorecký , The Engineer of Human Souls
38 " However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747. "
― Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion
39 " What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself? "
― Jeanette Winterson , Art and Lies
40 " There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called " ordinary" and accounted as " the majority," and who actually do make up the great majority of society. In their novels and stories writers most often try to choose and present vividly and artistically social types which are extremely seldom encountered in real life, and which are nevertheless more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin, viewed as a type, in perhaps exaggerated, but he is hardly unknown. How many clever people having learned from Gogol about Podkolyosin at once discover that great numbers of their friends bear a terrific resemblance to Podkolyosin. They knew before Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, except they did not know yet that that was their name...Nevertheless the question remains before us: what is the novelist to do with the absolutely " ordinary" people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting? To leave them out of a story completely is not possible, because ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necessary links in the chain of human affairs; leaving them out, therefore, means to destroy credibility. To fill a novel entirely with types or, simply for the sake of interest, strange and unheard-of people, would be improbable and most likely not even interesting. In our opinion the writer must try to find interesting and informative touches even among commonplace people. When, for example, the very nature of certain ordinary persons consists precisely of their perpetual and unvarying ordinariness, or, better still, when in spite of their most strenuous efforts to life themselves out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, then such persons acquire a certain character of their own-the typical character of mediocrity which refuses to remain what it is and desires at all costs to become original and independent, without having the slightest capacity for independence. "