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Life & Wisdom Quote by Ray Bradbury

"We are an impossibility in an impossible universe"

About this Quote

Bradbury turns cosmology into a dare: if the universe is already "impossible", then your own existence stops being a problem to solve and becomes a permission slip to live bigger. The line has the clean punch of science, but it behaves like poetry. "Impossibility" is doing double duty - a nod to the mind-bending fact of being conscious matter in a cold, indifferent expanse, and a rebuke to the small, bureaucratic ways we talk ourselves out of wonder. In one stroke, he makes despair and awe share the same room.

The subtext is classic Bradbury: the future is less a technology forecast than a moral test. He spent a career staging collisions between human longing and systems that flatten it - censorship in Fahrenheit 451, mechanized violence in The Martian Chronicles, the numbing comfort of speed and screens. Against that backdrop, "impossibility" reads like a defense of the irrational things that keep people human: curiosity, tenderness, imagination, art. If reality is already absurdly unlikely, then conformity isn't "safe"; it's wasteful.

Context matters because Bradbury wrote through the mid-century era that branded itself as rational and modern while perfecting mass destruction and mass distraction. His work often insists that wonder is not escapism but resistance. The sentence is small but insurgent: a reminder that your aliveness is not guaranteed by logic, so it shouldn't be governed by fear.

Quote Details

TopicMeaning of Life
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Bradbury, Ray. (2026, January 15). We are an impossibility in an impossible universe. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-an-impossibility-in-an-impossible-universe-90549/

Chicago Style
Bradbury, Ray. "We are an impossibility in an impossible universe." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-an-impossibility-in-an-impossible-universe-90549/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We are an impossibility in an impossible universe." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-an-impossibility-in-an-impossible-universe-90549/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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We Are an Impossibility in an Impossible Universe - Ray Bradbury
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About the Author

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was a Writer from USA.

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