Life & Wisdom Quote by Tom Robbins

Robbins is smuggling a dare into an aphorism: if you want the “impossible,” stop treating your own imagination like a gated community. The semicolon acts like a hinge, flipping from a shiny reward (“achieve the impossible”) to the real labor: thinking what your habits, your politics, your upbringing, your fear have all tagged as off-limits. The line works because it refuses the comforting version of creativity where inspiration floats down like confetti. It insists on cognitive trespassing.

“Unthinkable” is doing double duty. It can mean the visionary (ideas not yet available in the culture’s vocabulary) and the taboo (ideas you’re socially trained to recoil from). Robbins, a novelist steeped in counterculture playfulness, knows both terrains: the psychedelic conviction that reality is negotiable, and the darker truth that societies maintain order by policing which questions can be asked. To “think the unthinkable” is to break the spell of consensus, whether that consensus is a personal script (“people like me don’t do that”) or a public script (“we don’t talk about that”).

The intent isn’t just to hype boldness; it’s to diagnose why change so often fails. We chase new outcomes with old mental furniture, then act surprised when nothing rearranges. Robbins’ wink is that the impossible is rarely blocked by physics first; it’s blocked by permission. The subtext: imagination is a moral act. If you can’t tolerate the discomfort of certain thoughts, you’re volunteering to live inside someone else’s boundaries.