Daily Inspiration Quote by Pearl S. Buck

Possibility is Buck's quiet revolt against the bureaucrats of reality. The line opens with a nearly childlike provocation - "All things are possible" - then immediately tightens the screw: possibility survives right up to the moment someone nails an "impossible" sign to it. That conditional framing matters. Buck isn't selling optimism as a mood; she's describing optimism as a rule of evidence. The world doesn't close because it's inherently limited, but because institutions, experts, and exhausted people declare it closed.

The subtext is less self-help poster and more political and moral stance. "Proved impossible" implies gatekeepers: science, law, custom, empire, family. Buck spent her life writing across boundaries - between China and America, between domestic life and global upheaval - and her fiction repeatedly exposes how "impossible" often means "inconvenient for the powerful" or "unimaginable to the comfortable". The second clause, "and even the impossible may only be so, as of now", punctures certainty with time. It's a reminder that today's limits are frequently just today's tools, today's ethics, today's willingness.

What makes the sentence work is its rhythm of escalation. It grants skepticism ("proved impossible") to earn credibility, then slips in a destabilizing temporal qualifier ("as of now") that reopens the case. Buck is arguing for intellectual humility and human agency at once: accept evidence, but distrust final verdicts, especially when they function as cultural handcuffs. In an era that treated whole lives - women, migrants, the poor - as fixed categories, her "as of now" reads like a lever under history's door.