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Unthinkable   /ənθˈɪŋkəbəl/   Listen
Unthinkable

adjective
1.
Incapable of being conceived or considered.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Unthinkable" Quotes from Famous Books



... to be untrue tot he cause of Democracy would be almost unthinkable; the great men who made her a united nation were all in different ways apostles of Democracy. Mazzini was its preacher; Garibaldi fought for it on many fields, in South America, in Italy and in France; Victor Emmanuel was the first democratic sovereign in Europe in the nineteenth ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... party in power are concerns him not at all. That an individual, or a group of individuals, powerful financially or politically, should influence him in his choice or in his placing of the men under him is unthinkable. That a political boss in this or in that district, should dictate who should and who should not, be employed in the street-cleaning department, even down to the meanest remover of dung with a dust-pan, as was done for years in New York and every other ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... discovered a way by which I can flee to your far-distant universe, where not even the powers of the Council of Three can follow me. That way lies through the door of inter-dimensional Space. In Space as you know it, the almost unthinkable distance of a million light years separates Xollar from the dwarf star you call your Sun. Yet, traveling between Space, the two planets nearly touch each other. The same situation of being near neighbors ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells

... influence their thinking. The sentimental nurse, for instance, may find it very difficult to give an ordered hypodermic. The patient dreads the pain and the nurse fears hurting her. Suppose she were to fail to give it on such grounds. This is an almost unthinkable case. But the very nurse who agrees that such an emotional weakling should not be allowed to train, will help her patient, even when recuperating nicely, to grow inexcusably self-centered, by sympathizing with every complaint, warning her at every turn, by allowing her and ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter

... confront a man with the unthinkable, and then expect him to take credit for not having been guilty of it! Would I have snatched a juicy bone away from a starving lion? That's what Leaver has been all these months. It's what any man ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond

... type to be intimidated by sulks and silences, and more definite steps might quickly carry the situation out of her hands. The present with Bert was difficult, but a future that did not include him was simply unthinkable. No, a woman who had four young children to consider had no redress; she could only endure. Nancy liked the martyr role, and frequently had cause, or imagined she had ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris

... the greatest intellect of her generation, the revelation of her heart will be a great surprise and delight. A deep, strong, passionate, loving human soul, with heights and depths of devotion and tenderness unthinkable even to the poorer natures around her,—it was in this that both her strength and her weakness lay. This affectionateness was shown in her youth in her devotion to her father, whose home she kept for several years, and in lavish regard for the few friends who were near her, all of whom she ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... his throat and tongue were dry and swollen. Nor could he touch that still thing, in its passivity more terrible than in its violence. He was afraid that every moment it would lift its face, and show him some new unthinkable horror. He skirted it as though it might leap upon him and devour him, and rushed downstairs, faster and faster, with a thousand devils hunting at ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... that platform to make that stone come down if anything happened that the wire device did not work. You cannot go back on your King whatever else you do, and to permit any grounds to exist for supposing that he had not been punctual was unthinkable. But fortunately for all concerned our ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and ...
— White Fang • Jack London

... flesh and blood. Life spread before him like a geometrical figure, constructed of perfect circles and absolutely conformable to the rules and the principles of mathematics. That these perfect circles should ever run wild and become a square was clearly unthinkable. Because his nature was not quiescent it was impossible for him to ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... and argues that it was largely on this ground that it was counted sacred. Licht has also published a learned study of paiderastia in Attic comedy (Anthropophyteia, vol. vii, 1910), and remarks that "without paiderastia Greek comedy is unthinkable." Paiderastia in the Greek anthology has been fully explored by P. Stephanus (Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. ix, 1908, p. 213). Kiefer, who has studied Socrates in relation to homosexuality (O. Kiefer, "Socrates und die Homosexualitaet," ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... he told me that his right leg had been amputated, and that he was lucky to get off so easily. That made me rebellious and very, very bitter. And it was against God that I felt worst—God who had allowed this unthinkable thing to be. ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem

... Jack!" she cried, "it is horrible, horrible! Eric is at his solicitors' and they tell him that suspicion is bound to fall on him! It's preposterous—unthinkable. It must have been some fiend who committed such a crime, ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... gate. It was a mighty thing. From its construction Carthoris could but dimly speculate upon its unthinkable antiquity. ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... moving about England at all times of the year, the reality of these things is for ever pressing; the unthinkable selfishness of so many, and the awful depression of the multitude. She says that a system which produces, or permits, such a state of things must be ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... metaphorically to push him towards Miss Van Tuyn. It was inexplicable. Lady Sellingworth was a woman of the world, past mistress of all the convenances, one in whom any breach of good manners was impossible, unthinkable! And yet she had asked him to go back to the restaurant, and to thrust himself into the company of a girl and a man who were dining by themselves. She had even asked him, a young fellow, certainly younger than Beryl Van Tuyn's ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... your companions and sit very quietly, and if you sit long enough and quiet enough it may come to you; but this thing alone of all things you cannot steal, nor can it be given to you by the County Council. It cannot be communicated, and yet you may get it. It is unspeakable but not unthinkable, and it is born as certainly and unaccountably as you were yourself, and is of just as little immediate consequence. Long, long ago in the dim beginnings of the world there was a careless and gay young man who said—"Let truth go to hell"—and it went there. It was his misfortune that he ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... you—all that your pride would have me. I would please the world for your sake, conquer it both with mind and person. And you must endeavour to better yourself, day by day, nobly and with high aim, so that the source of my inspiration remain ever pure and fresh, and I attain to heights unthinkable save for your faith in me and ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... reaching shore or by pulling alongside one of the many boats plying a coastal trade from one island to another. An escape attempt would have been quite feasible, assuming Ned Land managed to seize the skiff without the captain's knowledge. But in midocean it was unthinkable. ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... perhaps, like Kirstie, a connection of her master's, and at least knows the legend of her own family, and may count kinship with some illustrious dead. For that is the mark of the Scot of all classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation. No more characteristic instance ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of wide acquaintance and an attractive popular personality, Keith had not as yet made a start. He did not worry—that was not his nature—but he began to realize that he must do one of two things: either make some money, somehow, or give up his present mode of living. The latter course was unthinkable! ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... confusion he almost forgot Elizabeth, until suddenly the whirl of his thoughts was pierced by the poignant realization that his outcry of dismay at his mother's confession had practically told Elizabeth that he was willing to let her do what he found unthinkable in his mother. His whole body winced with mortification. It was the first prick of the sword of shame— that sword of the Lord! Even while he reddened to his forehead the sword-thrust came again in a flash of memory. It was only ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland

... confronted with such an idea, it always harks back to its eternal question: How has something come out of nothing? The question is false; for the idea of nothing is only a pseudo-idea. Nothing is unthinkable, since to think nothing is necessarily to think or not to think something; and according to Mr Bergson's formula, (Cf. the discussion on existence and non-existence in chapter iv. of "Creative Evolution", pages 298-322.) "the representation of void is always a full representation." When I ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy

... profanity, a sacrilege committed against the divinities of the hearth and of the marriage bed. But for that phrase Mr. Ransome's weakness must have been passed in silence as the unspeakable, incredible, unthinkable thing it was. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... hyperbole of metaphor, and tell what centuries of time and profounds of unthinkable agony and horror can obtain in each interval of all the intervals between the notes of a quick jig played quickly on the piano. I talk for an hour, elaborating that one phase of Hasheesh Land, and at the end I have told them nothing. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... him; to do without her was unthinkable. For many years he had had voluptuous dreams of marriage, but he had gone on waiting and amassing money. He brooded with relish, in profound secret, over the image of a girl—virtuous, poor (she must be poor), very young, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... was speaking—or rather screaming—for his voice, pitched high, seemed to fill the entire room—every glance was fixed upon de Marmont. Every one of course expected a contradiction as hot and intemperate as was the accusation. It was unthinkable, impossible that what St. Genis said could be true. They all knew de Marmont well. Nephew of the Duc de Raguse who had borne the lion's share in surrendering Paris to the allies and bringing about the downfall of the Corsican usurper, he was one of the most trusted members of the ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... I know you felt as I did how nice it would be to give Jean all the things that she has never had and which money can buy. I admit I am horribly disappointed about it, but I'm not at all sure that this odd trick of fortune's won't help you. Her attitude was that marriage with you was unthinkable; you had so much and she had so little. Well, this evens things up. Don't come. Don't write. Leave her alone to try her wings. She will want to try all sorts of schemes for helping people, and I'm afraid the poor child will get many bad falls. So long as she ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)

... diverse expedients. Me the restless, so feverishly tired of her, she exercised in fresh fields. One result was, that I found out in those trial-grounds ever so many reasons why flight from Africa would be unthinkable for me. While as to him, my friend, whose doom of exile from her she had herself done much to bring about, I am sure that she dazzled him on that his road to the railway (his Via Dolorosa,) making assurance ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... came and destroyed all your hopes—the very possibility of a union with you has now become unthinkable to me. ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)

... life? What was beyond it after death? Would immortality, if such there were, be worth having? Men in countless, unthinkable millions, had lived, and loved, and lost, and passed on. Did immortality carry with it pain and suffering for them? If not, did it carry happiness and balm? To hell with religions and philosophies, he thought; they were all a parcel of fairy tales to drug men's minds and keep them tame; and he ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh

... we may apparently dismiss belief in a great personal power of evil and in his realm of everlasting torture. The independent origin of such a power of evil is unthinkable; so is the struggle between the two powers and its end. There is no absolutely distinct line between good and evil. The shades ...
— The Religious Situation • Goldwin Smith

... to do things. Nothing else can take the place of achievement in his life. Real happiness without achievement of some worthy aim is unthinkable. One of the greatest satisfactions in this world is the feeling of enlargement, of growth, of stretching upward and onward. No pleasure can surpass that which comes from the consciousness of feeling one's horizon of ignorance being pushed ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... go along the next week end—or the next, either. The suggestion simply is unthinkable. Such digressions may be all right for the leisure class or for invalids; but for adults, live ones, strong and playing the game? A shrug and a tolerant smile end the discussion, as, hands still in his pockets, an ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... with—with admiration. You won't be able to bear any of those things, least of all the last. You will have some involuntary shudder of horror at him, or you will obey your heart and run to comfort Daisy, and give it all away. Yours is one of the schemes that don't come off, because they are unthinkable." ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

... the door could scarce open the gigantic portal quickly enough for him. He fled—fled, surrounded by nightmare visions of horrible publicity in a law-court. Unthinkable tortures! He damned Mr. Oxford to the nethermost places, and swore that he would not lift a finger to save Mr. Oxford from penal servitude ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... imagine a really high-minded youth setting out in such a Quixotic and fanatical enterprise. This feature of Schiller's plot, which has for us something of the burlesque about it, has been taken more than any other to prove his inexperience of life. But the fact is that the thing was after all not so unthinkable. Outlawry on a large scale was by no means unknown, and the romance of outlawry was familiar in literature. The Thirty Years' War had familiarized Germany with marauding bands who recognized no authority save that of their leader. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... Theatre at Stockholm. To the officials of this state—supported institution Strindberg submitted his work—hopefully, as we know from his own statement. It was scornfully and ignominiously rejected, the main criticism being that a serious historical drama in prose was unthinkable. I shall make no comment whatever on that judgment, having in mind how several years later Edmund Gosse bewailed the failure of Ibsen to give a metrical form ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg

... not be. It is an unthinkable calamity. It means that the very process of capitalistic development is hindered, stopped. It means a setback of ten years in the process. It means work, endless work, to overcome the setback. It means not alone the passage ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London

... control and has insured constancy and permanency of quality and quantity of output. In the sugar industry, the chemist has been active for so long a time that "the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." The sugar industry without the chemist is unthinkable. The Welsbach mantle is distinctly a chemist's invention and its successful and economical manufacture depends largely upon chemical methods. It would be difficult to give a just estimate of the economic effect ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... Number One assented, gravely: "unthinkable is the word. But you haven't answered ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... fusillade of theological lyddite at Bruno, declaring that any Churchman who would so much as hold converse with such a wretch was disgraced forever, and that the propositions Bruno wished to argue were unthinkable to a self-respecting man. He declared that it was only the mercy of God that kept the lightning from striking Bruno dead as he wrote ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... be told with adequate confidence that Westley Keyts was not of their number. As to the damage suit, Westley found it unthinkable that Potts could deteriorate ten thousand dollars worth and still walk the earth. Indeed, he believed, and uttered a few rough words to express it, that ten dollars would be an excessive valuation even if Potts were ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... first thought! But in the case of the Jena, it was quickly discovered that treachery was impossible, unless it was that of the highest officers, for only they had access to her magazines. That was unthinkable, for all of them had served France for many years. More than half of them were killed. I myself investigated the life of every one of these men, for it was necessary to be absolutely certain—but not a breath could be raised ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... orthodox Victor and his family are. Of course I don't agree with them—perhaps I have broader views—(with a shrug) but I understand how they feel. They consider that any union without a church marriage is—well, to put it mildly, unthinkable. ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... the Absolute[AA] [Greek: kat' exochen], of the unconditioned first principle of all things. If the mind, in every act of thought, imposes its own forms on its objects, to think is to condition, and the unconditioned is the unthinkable. Such was the logical result of Kant's principles, but not the actual result. For Kant, by distinguishing between the Understanding and the Reason, and giving to the latter an indirect yet positive cognition of the Unconditioned as a regulative principle of thought, prepared ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel

... itself. But when the treaty is acted upon, I must know whether it means that we have ratified or rejected it. We cannot rewrite this treaty. We must take it without changes which alter its meaning, or leave it, and then, after the rest of the world has signed it, we must face the unthinkable task of making another and separate kind of treaty with Germany." In conclusion he declared: "If there is any doubt as to what the people of the country think on this vital matter, the clear and single way out is to submit it for determination at the next election ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane

... pitiful. They were so many and so thickly did they fall that the ambulance service at first was not sufficient to handle them. They lay in the fields or forests sometimes for a day before they were picked up, suffering unthinkable agony. And after they were placed in cars and started back toward Paris the tortures continued. Some of the trains of wounded that arrived outside the city had not been opened in two days. The wounded had been without food or water. They had not been able to move from the positions ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis

... moment or two Lennox was in despair, while his heart continued to swell with grief and rage. It was unthinkable that the noblest young Onondaga of them all, one fit to be in his time the greatest of sachems, the very head and heart of the League, should be cut down by a mere skulker. And yet it had happened. Tayoga lay, still wholly unconscious, and ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler

... to myself, "this sort of thing never happens to me." For the notion was quite unthinkable, the notion I mean of my own dear image, called up like this without my knowledge, to turn my discreet way ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith

... now, now that these things are clearly proved, now, when Germany finds but one servile nation in Europe—Turkey—that the French Government thinks fit to seek to draw closer to Germany! The thing is unthinkable, unbelievable! ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam

... quality; all moonlight is that way if you will observe it. Imagine my surprise and indignation when I saw the floor occupied by at least a dozen other lodgers! I sat up, earnestly damning the management of that unthinkable hotel, and was about to spring from the bed to go and make trouble for the night- clerk—him of the apologetic manner and the tallow candle—when something in the situation affected me with a strange indisposition to move. I suppose ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce

... who goes to the abortionist's table is not a criminal but a martyr—a martyr to the bitter, unthinkable conditions brought about by the blindness of society at large. These conditions give her the choice between the surgeon's instruments and the sacrificing of what is highest and holiest in her—her aspiration to freedom, her desire to protect ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... she should have found some outlet of the kind, for in the curious circumstances of her upbringing she had missed that sentimental stage which is the measles of puberty. She had never trembled with adoration of a schoolmistress and Considine was an unthinkable substitute. In Dublin she had learned for the first time that she was beautiful, and that her country clothes did not show her at her best. This, together with Radway's attentions, had revealed to her the fact that she was a woman, and therefore made ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... intelligible relation with the physical, moral, and if you like supernatural order of the great world around him. Sex was felt from the first to be part, and a foundational part, of the great order of the world and of human nature; and therefore to separate it from Religion was unthinkable and a kind of contradiction ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... but the whole trend of society is in that direction. All the social forces are driving man on to a time when the old selective law will be annulled. There is no escaping it, save by the intervention of catastrophes and cataclysms quite unthinkable. It is inexorable. It is inexorable because the common man demands it. The twentieth century, the common man says, is his day; the common man's day, or, rather, the dawning ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... crime, but as something much more solid and more difficult to get rid of—a political necessity and a moral solution. Directly it appeared its practical usefulness became undeniable, and also the fact that, for better or worse, it was impossible to get rid of it again except by the unthinkable way of another carving, of another partition, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... was craven at the thought. She crept out often and looked down, and as often drew back, shuddering. To fall down, down on to the tree tops, to be dropped from branch to branch, a broken thing, and perhaps even not yet dead—that was the unthinkable thing, to live for a time ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... been embarrassed by their too close attendance. If he had been able to do so he might have spoken harshly to his dogs, but he could not; it was unthinkable that he should; and the boy might have spoken harshly to him if he had dared to do it. For this was the order of Fionn's affection: first there was the boy; next, Bran and Sceo'lan with their three whelps; then Caelte ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens

... begin to chafe? What if they two should, in days to come, degenerate into just the ordinary, everyday married folk, whom she saw about her everywhere, and for whom just such horrid books as this must be written? It was unbelievable, unthinkable. And yet, ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... Schuyler, had ever, to my knowledge, enjoyed the friendship of Vicky Van. But not for a minute, did I think that she would go so far as to kill him for daring to enter her house! That was unthinkable. ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells

... to be the common root of sensibility and understanding, and with Schulze, the concept of the thing in itself to be an imaginary or irrational quantity, a thought that cannot be carried out; it is not only unknowable, but unthinkable. That alone is knowable which we ourselves produce, hence only the form of representation. The matter of representation is "given," but this does not mean that it arises from the action of the thing in itself, but ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... far, far away in the seductive land of philosophical speculation, and revel in the freedom and irresponsibility of Agnosticism; and lo! when adversity smites, and bankruptcy is upon us, we toss the husks of the "Unknowable and Unthinkable" behind us, and flee as the Prodigal who knew his father, to that God whom (in trouble) ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... a moment, and then flushed in her turn. To let her cousin ride Bobs seventeen miles was unthinkable. She had the profoundest regard for her pony's back; and she knew that even Brown Betty's seasoned hide was giving way under the unskilled horsemanship of the city boy. It was very doubtful, moreover, that it would be safe to mount him on Bobs, who was already excited ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... Jack-in-the-box was really pursuing him, that in that labyrinth of little streets he could soon throw him off the scent. He dived in and out of those crooked lanes, which were more like cracks than thoroughfares; and by the time that he had completed about twenty alternate angles and described an unthinkable polygon, he paused to listen for any sound of pursuit. There was none; there could not in any case have been much, for the little streets were thick with the soundless snow. Somewhere behind Red Lion Court, however, ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... and death were enacted from time to time to maintain its circulation at fixed values, there was a steady depreciation in value until it reached zero point and culminated in repudiation. The aggregate of the issues amounted to no less than the enormous and unthinkable sum of $9,500,000,000, and in the middle of 1797 when public repudiation took place, there was no less than $4,200,000,000 in face value of assignats and mandats outstanding; the loss, as always, falling mostly upon the ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White

... Hemisphere. A lowering process, he says, has thus been going on in the ocean levels to the north through immeasurable time, its record being the ancient water-marks now high up on the mountain sides of British Columbia and elsewhere. It is certainly not unthinkable that, if subject to such a displacement of its centre of gravity, our planet at some inconceivably remote period capsized, so that what were before the Tropics became the Poles, and that such a catastrophe ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... with excitement. The President had appeared before Congress that day and made a speech calling for war; and the Germans and Austrians in the local were wild with indignation, shaking their fists and clamouring against the unthinkable outrage of an attack upon the Fatherland. There was a new edition of the Worker just out, filled with bitter protests, and the Germans and the pacifists wanted to pledge the local to a movement for a general ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... my head wasn't made of solid blue mush I'd have had a way figured out of this thing before now, but I can't. With that zone of force the Skylark would have everything imaginable—without it, we're exactly where we were before. That zone is immense, man—terrific—its possibilities are unthinkable—and I'm so cussed dumb that I can't find out how to use it intelligently—can't use it at all, for that matter. By its very nature it is impenetrable to any form of matter, however applied; and this calc here," slapping viciously the sheaf of papers containing ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... Eleanor—or me; but that's nothing. Eleanor deserves it; and very likely I do, too! But he's so frightfully honorable about Eleanor—he's a perfect crank on honor!—that he blames himself for even that." By this time the possibility that the unknown somebody was "horrid" had become unthinkable; she was probably terribly attractive, and Maurice had a crush on ... "though, of course, she can't be really nice," Edith thought; "Maurice simply doesn't see through her. Boys are so stupid! They don't know girls," Again there ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

... its component ions, floating in the life-fluid (luminiferous ether) of some animal. Possibly the wee creatures peopling the corpuscles of our own blood are overcome with the proper emotion when contemplating the unthinkable distance from one of ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... They do not realize how many problems they have solved and abolished, as the art of medicine has abolished diseases. When they hear speak of the eternal conflict between Nationality and Nationality, they often forget that a war between England and Scotland has long since become unthinkable and that the platitudes of St. Andrew's Day are still paradoxes in Central and Eastern Europe. When they are told of States where the spontaneous manifestations of group-life, non-conforming sects, workmen's associations, and ordinary ...
— Progress and History • Various

... replied that fairies were unscientific, and even unthinkable, and the divine declared that they were too heterodox even for the advanced state of modern theology, and had been condemned by several councils, which is true. And the professor ran through all the animal kingdoms and sub-kingdoms ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... Uddalaka, "there was that only which is ([Greek: to hon]); one only, without a second. Others say, in the beginning there was that only which is not ([Greek: to mae hon]); one only, without a second; and from that which is not, that which is was born." But Uddalaka rejects this latter doctrine as unthinkable—which, indeed, many explorers of Hegel have found with pain and anguish of mind. And then the father traces all the multiformity of the Universe to the desire or will of the original ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton

... and, explained the caller looking extremely pleased,—he was a man-caller, and therefore more willing to stop and talk—to proceed backwards from a state of war to the status quo ante might produce the unthinkable result of costing the Kaiser ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley

... nature, had almost as much influence as a Minister Plenipotentiary. For the Turks lived in terror of the Great Powers who squatted round the edge waiting an opportunity to pounce, and allowed consuls to do things unthinkable in any other land. During the late war America was roused to frenzy because the German representatives there tried to work a German propaganda. But for over a century the representative of every Power that wanted a bit of Turkey, not only worked ceaselessly by similar means, but had ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith

... much trouble. He looked across the office at Copper placidly filing case cards. She wasn't worrying. With sublime faith, she was sure that he would find the answer, the one that would solve everything. He shuddered. The only logical solution was abortion—and that was unthinkable! He would not murder his child—nor would Copper permit it if he was ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone

... grounded psyche of the criminal and his environing external conditions.'' (Liszt). Each particular deed is thinkable only when a determinate character of the doer is brought in relation with it—a certain character predisposes to determinate deeds, another character makes them unthinkable and unrelatable with this or that person. But who thinks to know the character of a man without knowing his view of the world, and who talks of their world-views with his criminals? "Whoever wants to learn to know men,'' says Hippel,[1] "must ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... answer might be, she would see him again before leaving Vienna, although not that day perhaps. Indeed, anything else was quite unthinkable. Why, then, was she a prey to this dreadful agitation, as though all were over between them? But why was his answer so long in coming?... He had, in any case, gone out to dinner—of course, he had no one to keep house for ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler

... you enlist?" In every case the answer was the same. That memorable day in August came. Suddenly the old haunts were desolate, the boon companions had gone. It was unthinkable to leave the danger to them and accept only the pleasures oneself, to go on enjoying the sweet things of life in defence of which they were perhaps even then shedding their blood in the north. Some day they would return, and with ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger

... necessary to assume that the "ultramundane" particles are possessed of absolute elasticity, so that they rebound from one another on collision without loss of speed. It is also necessary to assume that all tangible matter has to an almost unthinkable degree a sievelike texture, so that the vast proportion of the coercive particles pass entirely through the body of any mass they encounter—a star or world, for example—without really touching any part of its actual substance. This assumption is necessary because ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams

... this moment trying to persuade my father, at what age do you suppose it will please God to give me the heart of a man? My mother is sure to prefer somebody not fit to stand in your dingiest cotton frock. Anybody but you for my wife is a thing unthinkable. God would never degrade me to any choice of my mother's! He knows you for the very best woman I shall ever have the chance of marrying. Shall I tell you the sort of woman my mother would like me to marry? Oh, I know the sort! First, she must be tall and handsome, with ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald

... populations of peace and unpreparedness were growing up who would discourage a world war—would not permit it. There were increasing millions of people who had never seen a soldier, never seen a battleship. Would they want to pay the cost in blood and billions of treasure? It was unthinkable. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry

... for dinner, and then made a few hasty preparations for her flight. She laid no elaborate plans for effecting it, for she anticipated no difficulty. The night would be dark, and she could rely upon her ingenuity for the rest. Failure was unthinkable. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... Has Pittsburgh a literature? Those rolling clouds of smoke, those mighty industries, those men of brawn, those men of energy, that ceaseless calculation of wages and dividends—can these produce an atmosphere for letters? It seems unthinkable. Yet hold! Only the other day on the train a man who has been a resident of New York for thirty-five years remarked in this author's presence that "Pittsburgh is the most intellectual city in America." He had never visited Pittsburgh and the author ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church

... feared in some quarters. This would be much more likely to take place in the event of reactionary movements being successful in each of the two countries, whereas an effective unity of purpose between Lenin and the present essentially middle-class Government of Germany is unthinkable. On the other hand, the same people who fear such a union are even more afraid of the success of Bolshevism; and yet they have to recognize that the only efficient forces for fighting it are, inside Russia, the reactionaries, and, outside Russia, the established forces of order ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes

... light. Is this efficiency of conversion of the visual apparatus everlastingly fixed? For the answer it is necessary to turn to the physiologist, and doubtless he would suggest the curbing of the imagination. But is it unthinkable that the visual processes will always be beyond the control of man? However, to turn again to the physics of light-production, there are still several processes of producing light which ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... of the bewildering puzzles and ghastly problems of human life as seen by the eyes of ignorance. She had grasped in its highest meaning the truth—that Man is really a living soul, living from eternity to eternity. An immortality with one end to it was to her an unthinkable proposition which could not possibly be true. For her, as for her father, Eternal Life and Eternal Justice were one. Where a man ended one life, from that point he began the next: for good or for evil, for ignorance or for knowledge. A life lived and ended in righteousness (not, ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith

... pains to accompany this query with a broadside that rendered such a supposition most unthinkable. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... you have done me less than justice. There had been so much correspondence between Philip and myself, so many notes had passed touching the death of Escovedo, and there was that habit of Philip's of writing his replies in marginal notes to my own letters and so returning them, that it was unthinkable he should have kept them all in his memory, and the abstraction of three or four could not conceivably ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... at a loss to understand the drift of her father's talk. He could not connect her with Drazk's disappearance, or he would not approach the matter with such unconcern. That was unthinkable. Neither could Transley, or he would not have sent so brutal a message. And yet it was clear that they thought ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... deplorably led, they could agree on no policy, and their warmest supporters in the Press and in the country were the first to admit that the formation of an alternative Conservative Administration was unthinkable. Nevertheless, there could be no rival for the leadership. Mr. Balfour, aloof, indifferent, without enthusiasm, and without convictions, although discredited in the country and harassed in his attempts to save his party ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... recovered. At least it was unthinkable that he shouldn't. What object else would these ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann

... for me unthinkable, because I saw it would be a sudden and catastrophic incursion upon a cosmos of Law ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates

... to speculate. It was not for this—and it could not be for that. As to that other thing it was unthinkable. ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad

... something in another life. Don't you know what my being here at this moment means? The thing is all over, Miss Carstairs—all past and done with an hour before you ever saw your mother. I gave it up voluntarily. When the time came, just now on the yacht, I found out that it was impossible—unthinkable—I couldn't do it. The game was up then. That is one thing that your mother could not tell you, and it was to tell you this, and all the rest of it, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... because of a silly convention you would ruin all your life by going on with these ways—it is unthinkable!" and his deep voice vibrated with feeling. "It is a mistake, that is all, and can be rectified,—if you were already married to this man I would not plead so, because then you would have crossed the Rubicon, ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn

... widening eyes. This woman with the false hair, the false teeth, the false murderous smile—what was she offering her but immunity from some unthinkable crime? Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood. She had come to this dreadful place because ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton

... unmixed with a feeling akin to awe: it should involve that degree of respect of each for the other that makes even the most trifling interference with liberty an utter impossibility, and a common life enforced by one against the will of the other an unthinkable thing of deep horror. It is not so that marriage is conceived by lawyers who make settlements, or by priests who give the name of "sacrament'' to an institution which pretends to find something sanctifiable in the ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... fell off his chair with surprise. That some philanthropist should rag Mill's study was only to be expected. Mill was one of the worst. A worm without a saving grace. But Trevor! Captain of football! In the first eleven! The thing was unthinkable. ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse

... Palmer, Professor of Latin, was reputed to be the best scholar in Oxford, and Mrs. Palmer was a most genial hostess. Henry Smith, Professor of Geometry, was, I suppose, the most accomplished man of his time;[16] yet he lives, not by his performances in the unthinkable sphere of metaphysical mathematics, but by his intervention at Gladstone's last contest for the University. Those were the days of open voting, and Smith was watching the votes in Gladstone's interest. Professor ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... honest and more sensible than to undo the wrong that ignorance and inexperience has accomplished. No woman's moral or spiritual salvation is dependent upon her wearing the fetters of a marriage abhorred. Such a stupid sacrifice is unthinkable to modesty and decency, and is repulsive to common sense. And any god who is supposed to demand that of humanity is not the true God, but is as grotesque and false as any African idol or any deity ever worshipped by Puritan ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... Plainly, Warde had discovered the fact of the debt. Probably that fool Beaumont-Greene had applied to his father, and the father had written to Warde. It was unthinkable that Warde knew more than this. Having reached this conclusion, Lovell turned over in his mind two or three specious lies that might ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell

... go on like this," Mrs. Willis protested. "It is unthinkable—to allow six children to struggle alone for a living on a barren little farm. Doesn't anyone take an interest in them—the Hildreths or any of the people who live near and who knew ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence

... world. That they would ever become trade unionists, ever evolve the class consciousness of the intelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all, that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helped along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was unthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from household labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was to result in the humanizing of industry, ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... and the relation of double degree, which we have already found existing between aesthetic and logical activity, is repeated between these two on a larger scale. Knowledge independent of the will is thinkable; will independent of knowledge is unthinkable. Blind will is not will; ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... we not to have shown first of all that He is conscious? No, for the greater includes the less, and purpose is unthinkable apart from consciousness. In saying this we are aware that a philosopher like Eduard von Hartmann speaks of "the wisdom of the Unconscious," of "the mechanical devices which It employs," of "the direction of the goal intended ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... downright brutality in it which militates against any subtly voluptuous explanation. Can it be that he is simply and solely appealing here to what he is led to believe is the taste of his Anglo-Saxon readers? No—that, surely, were unworthy of him. That surely must be considered unthinkable! Is it that, being himself of an abnormally nervous and sensitive temperament, he forces himself by a kind of intellectual asceticism to rush upon the pricks of a physiological brutality as the sort of penance a conscientious writer has ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... property rights. Whenever any of the successive forms and methods has failed its fate was doomed. In this temper of the masses, in the flight of the ruling class, in the distemper of the radical democracy, a constitutional monarchy was unthinkable. A presidential government on the model of that devised and used by the United States was equally impossible, because the French appear already to have had a premonition or an instinct that a ripe experience of liberty was essential ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... the world grows better, may do so by comparing contemporaneous literature with the reading of other days. "The Heptameron," of Margaret of Navarre, is a book so filthy as to be nauseating. That people could read it from inclination is unthinkable; and to believe that a woman could read it, much less write it, taxes too sorely our credulity. In truth, this work did not, in the days of its origin, shock the people's sensibilities. A woman wrote it, and she a sister of Francis I of France, and herself Queen of Navarre, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... will increase prodigiously-just as it has increased prodigiously during the last few centuries, following upon the increase in food-getting efficiency. The magnitude of population in that future day is well nigh unthinkable. But there is only so much land and water on the surface of the earth. Man, despite his marvellous accomplishments, will never be able to increase the diameter of the planet. The old days of virgin continents ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London

... moment. He realized that something which was rising in his throat must be crushed back and swallowed before speech would be possible. If he tried to speak before that was done—he would shame his manhood, he would do that which was unthinkable in a man and a soldier. What would happen if the little iron wicket in the great iron door in the greater wooden gates opened before he had swallowed the lump in his throat, had crushed down the rising tumult of emotion, and a European official, perhaps Major Ranald himself, spoke ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren

... not forgathered with punchers and townsfolk for nothing. He was naturally shrewd, and he did not offer or controvert opinions hastily. He stood holding a bit of old tie-rope in his hand, pondering this last unthinkable development of the situation. Smiler was to be left behind. Jimmy wanted to ask why Smiler could not go. He wanted to assure his father that Smiler would be a help rather than a hindrance to ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... difference—there are always high and brave and amusing lives to be lived; and a change of key, however exotic, does not exclude melody. Even Chinamen, hard as we find it to believe, enjoy being Chinese. And the Chinaman stands alone to be unthinkable; natural enough, as the representative of the only other great civilisation. Take my people here at my doors; their life is a very good one; it is quite thinkable, quite acceptable to us. And the little dears will be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and a Moslem's—indeed, it is often not easy even if you have a lifelong knowledge of the country. The finest qualities of Islam—and they are many—they have rejected, and for so doing they have suffered unthinkable hardships and persecutions. Bad as things are to-day, they were far, far worse in the days before the British Occupation, when the Christians were at the mercy ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... the letter aside and picking up another. "Now, how's this ... good grief! The Ancient Order of Hibernians, if you please, formally requests that ... since '58 Beta was launched on St. Patrick's day ... to do otherwise with this launch would be unthinkable, sacrilegious, treasonable, ...
— If at First You Don't... • John Brudy

... devoid of private property is an unthinkable proposition. Private property is not a fortuitous creation, but a natural growth. It is founded not merely upon law, but upon immemorial custom which owes its rise to a fundamental human instinct, an instinct which has been a characteristic ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster

... gravely prejudice the lasting interests of Italy, for she would forfeit her political independence by so doing, and incur the risk of sinking to a sort of vassal state of France. Such a contingency is not unthinkable, for, in judging the policy of Italy, we must not disregard her relations with England as well ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... spare yourself the pains of such unprofitable lying. That Marian Heleigh should have been guilty of a vulgar liaison with, an actor is to me, who know her, unthinkable. No, madam! It was fear, not love, which drove you hither to-night, and now a baser terror urges you to screen yourself by vilifying her. The woman of whom you speak is yourself. The letters were ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... out, in 1914, Otto Kahn did not hesitate for a second on which side to take his stand. For him, neutrality in the fight between light and darkness, between right and atrocious wrong, was unthinkable. And as he felt and thought, being a man of honour, of courage, and of decision, so he acted, totally regardless of the consequences to himself. He had "searched his conscience in sorrow and in ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn

... to live at all, if living involved all this misery. It had been bad enough in Dinan before his escape; but to tread back that weary road in proclaimed dishonour, exposed to contemptuous eyes at every halting-place, and to take up the burden again plus the shame—it was unthinkable, and he came near to a hysterical laugh at the command. He felt as a horse might feel when spurred up to a fence which it cannot face and foresees it must ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... holiday from the claims of the green-brown plains of summer. She must be ready at seven o'clock for the reception at the City Hall. She had a new gown for that particular event, which had, amongst others, been bought in New York. It had cost one hundred and thirty dollars, an unthinkable price it had seemed, but dismissed as something too paltry to be considered by the open-handed ranchman whom she claimed ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum

... sea and braves its tempests, must be in heart and character a sailor—and yet he who fights the scientific war-craft of the present day cannot be merely a sailor, like him of the olden kind, but must be what the New York Times, a few years ago, laughingly declared to be a combination quite unthinkable, "a scientific ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... need not have feared lest he should suspect the cause of the blush . . . a strange, absurd resentment of the idea that she could be married to Freddie Palmer. Live with him—yes. But marry—now that it was thus squarely presented to her, she found it unthinkable. She did not pause to analyze this feeling, indeed could not have analyzed it, had she tried. It was, however, a most interesting illustration of how she had been educated at last to look upon questions of sex as a man looks on them. She was like ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously, we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... Creek, valued at many thousands? The wisest professor of geology and expert of mines cannot explain it. This, I say, is the gold and silver from ornaments employed in temples of the idols of ancient races, who lived unthinkable thousands of years ago. The very stones of their temples have crumbled and been decomposed, but the precious metal has been formed into nuggets, according to the natural laws of molecular attraction, and under the impulse of gravity and in obedience ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann

... falsification of the law of aerial perspective, but it startled, almost terrified me. We so rely upon the orderly operation of familiar natural laws that any seeming suspension of them is noted as a menace to our safety, a warning of unthinkable calamity. So now the apparently causeless movement of the herbage and the slow, undeviating approach of the line of disturbances were distinctly disquieting. My companion appeared actually frightened, and ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various

... Horace, or as a detached spectator like Persius. The oft repeated accusation that his minute descriptions of vice shew a morbid interest therein, may fairly be refuted when one considers the almost unthinkable depths to which the republic had fallen. Only a tolerant or a secluded observer could avoid attacking openly and bitterly the evil conditions which obtruded themselves on every hand; and Juvenal, a genuine Roman of the active and virtuous old school, was neither tolerant nor secluded. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... unreconcilable; for while the first gave the afternoon of June twenty-sixth, as the time of appearance, the second set it for the evening of the same day. Now, these two points of the United States territory are not less than eight hundred miles apart. Even granting the automobile this unthinkable speed, greater than any it had yet shown, how could it have crossed all the intervening country unseen? How could it traverse the States of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin, from end to end without anyone of our agents ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne

... look at Janice as he talked. He moved doggedly toward the village, dragging at the donkey's head. They neared the houses very slowly, and Coburn considered that he walked into the probability of a group of other creatures from unthinkable other star systems, disguised as men. It did not occur to him that his sudden outburst about Dillon sounded desperately ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... was going to England, and she had a well-favored son. It is also possible that, being a lady of conventional ideas, she acted instinctively and could not help herself. That a young woman of extensive possessions should encourage a camp-packer was, from her point of view, unthinkable. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... itself best able to withstand the grinding action of more recent thought. But let us in fairness ask, What was the essential substance of that theory? Apparently it was the bare statement of the unthinkable fact that Something Is. It therefore seems to me useless in Mr. Fiske to lay so much stress on the fact that this Something was originally identified by atheists with the phenomenal universe. It seems useless to do this, because such identification is clearly no part of the essence of Atheism, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... some things so unthinkable that they only continue because people refuse to think of them. Sweating and slums are two such things, but the supreme example in ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray

... accept. Underneath would be a perfectly orderly pattern of events of some sort, behaving according to different natural laws in conflict with those we have existed under. Slowly we might penetrate to an understanding of them, but not at first, because at first they would be completely UNTHINKABLE. ...
— Unthinkable • Roger Phillips Graham

... came cautiously to the edge of the low cliff overlooking the Lost Sea of Korus I saw Thurid pushing out upon the bosom of the shimmering water in a small skiff—one of those strangely wrought craft of unthinkable age which the Holy Therns, with their organization of priests and lesser therns, were wont to distribute along the banks of the Iss, that the long journey of their victims ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... centuries ago, and Confucius expressed it exactly when he said, with reference to the future, "We do not know life; how can we know death?" This same dubious negation probably has the largest following of all types of unbelief in our time. It is not atheism: that, to the great mass of men, is unthinkable; it is easier to assume simply that "we do not know." Yet almost every form of agnosticism, ancient or modern, claims to possess a vast amount of very positive knowledge. Speculative hypothesis never employed the language of dogmatic assurance so confidently as now. Even theosophic occultism speaks ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... distant star such as Bellatrix required a journey lasting two hundred fifteen years each way. But even this was an improvement over the relatively crude spacedrives then in use, which made a journey from Earth to Pluto last for many months and one to the stars almost unthinkable. ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg

... Other things were wasted, he knew, since those who called Nature an economist had grossly flattered her. Types and races and revolutions were squandered with royal prodigality—but that he himself should be so was clearly unthinkable. Deep down in him there was the obstinate belief that his existence was a vital matter to the awful Power that ruled the universe; and while he worked that May evening at the second act of his great play, with the sweat raining from his brow in the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... Sure enough, it has happened. Yesterday it was September 8, Sunday; to-day, per the bulletin-board at the head of the companionway, it is September 10, Tuesday. There is something uncanny about it. And uncomfortable. In fact, nearly unthinkable, and wholly unrealizable, when one comes to consider it. While we were crossing the 180th meridian it was Sunday in the stern of the ship where my family were, and Tuesday in the bow where I was. They were there eating the half of a fresh apple on the 8th, and I was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... of sinners is awful enough, but it commends itself to every thought of justice and mercy; for sin must be cleansed from a perfect universe. But the unscriptural view of everlasting conscious torment that never reaches the point of full punishment, is unthinkable. Yet it is urged as a doctrine, and contended for as vital ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer

... alleviations. Trained nurses, for example, were uncommonly well-informed and agreeable young women, when you came to know them—and quite lady-like, too, for all that in our topsy-turvy days these girls had to work for their living. Unthinkable as it seemed, the colonel found that his night-nurse, a Miss Ramsay, was actually by birth a Ramsay of Blenheim; and for a little the discovery depressed him. But to be made much of, upon whatever terms, was always treatment to which the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... surely unthinkable! So Patty said, with exaggerated meekness, "Thank you, Little Billee, I accept it with pleasure. You are ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells

... ease. As far as one ventured to interpret actual science, the mind had thus far adjusted itself by an infinite series of infinitely delicate adjustments forced on it by the infinite motion of an infinite chaos of motion; dragged at one moment into the unknowable and unthinkable, then trying to scramble back within its senses and to bar the chaos out, but always assimilating bits of it, until at last, in 1900, a new avalanche of unknown forces had fallen on it, which required new mental powers to control. If this view was correct, the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams



Words linked to "Unthinkable" :   out of the question, incredible, unimaginable, thinkable, unbelievable, impossible, inconceivable



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