True-Yorkers move to the city to "find their purpose," like the groovy kids in Avenue Q. Errant blossoms in their hometowns, fueled by formerly-impossible dreams, they sink their helpfully-toughened roots into Manhattan's schist and bloom.
The idea sounds impossible but Barbara Gunnell, formerly a senior journalist at the Independent on Sunday, Observer and New Statesman, and Jonny Mundey, a musician and fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, decided that it wasn't.
And, for decades to come, admission to white-dominated universities remained so segregated, at least in the de-facto sense, that without the H.B.C.U.s higher education would have been an impossible aspiration for formerly enslaved people and their descendants.
That's why it was a pleasant surprise that our much maligned governor David Paterson understood the absurdity of making it impossible for the formerly incarcerated to work.
For all the commitment and intensity of the well-trained junior Ailey company, formerly the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble, it seemed impossible that dancers of such a different time could sink themselves into these naked characterizations.
"It's nearly impossible to do correctly," said Sean Morris, who formerly worked for a shop that imported Nissan Skylines, a car popularized in "The Fast and the Furious".
Thanks to government jamming devices, access to the BBC's Persian-language channel, formerly a popular source of news, has become well-nigh impossible in most parts of Tehran.
With nearly 300,000 Israelis living in the West Bank, some of them religious fundamentalists, and 200,000 in formerly Arab East Jerusalem, agreeing borders for a "viable" Palestinian state is near impossible without outside pressure.
