Cecil Williams Quotes

I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.

Great discoveries are made accidentally less often than the populace likes to think. (Commenting on how an accident led to the discovery of X-rays)

Praise your children openly, reprove them secretly.

Cecile made it sound like it was no big deal. "I've been fighting for freedom all my life." But she wasn't talking about protest signs, standing up to the Man, and knowing your rights. She was talking about her life. Just her. Not the people.

I didn’t want to say Big Ma was right. Cecile was no kind of mother. Cecile didn’t want us. Cecile was crazy. I didn’t have to.

I give you this charge, that you shall be of my Privy Council and content yourself to take pains for me and my realm. This judgement I have of you, that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift and that you will be faithful to the State, and that without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel that you think best: and, if you shall know anything necessary to be declared to me of secrecy, you shall show it to myself only and assure yourself I will not fail to keep taciturnity therein. And therefore herewith I charge you. Administering the oath of office to William Cecil as Secretary of State, November 20, 1558, as quoted in Elizabeth I: The Word of a Prince, A Life from Contemporary Documents, by Maria Perry, Chapter V, Section: To make a good account to Almighty God

As we were walking out the door excited about our excursion, Cecile called out, “I’m not coming down to no police station if you’re out there stealing. Y’all have to spend the night in jail.” That was as good a “Be safe and have a good time” as we were going to get from Cecile. We took it and left.

Mother is a statement of fact. Cecile Johnson gave birth to us. We came out of Cecile Johnson. In the animal kingdom that makes her our mother. Every mammal on the planet has a mother, dead or alive. Ran off or stayed put. Cecile Johnson—mammal birth giver, alive, an abandoner—is our mother. A statement of fact.

Late in the 16th centurt, William Cecil's son, Thomas reortedthat Philip had said that 'whatever he suffered from Queen Elizabeth was the judgement of God because, being married to Queen Elizabeth, whom he though a most virtuous and good lady, yet in the fancy of love he could not affect her; but as for the Lady Elizabeth; he was enamored of her, being a fair and beautiful woman.

Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street. -William Blake This admirable couplet should be posted in conspicuous places all over England. The truth it embodies is threatened by two parties of opinion: on the one hand by those who hold it as a sin against nature to try and control the increase of population in any way and on the other by those who believe in 'growth', the pursuit at all costs of a standard of living which entails more and more industrialization and urbanization. If the believers in nature have their way, England will in the end be so full of people that they will be jostling each other even on mountains: if the believers in 'growth' have their way, the whole country will be covered with streets and we shall hardly be aware that mountains exist.

In 1561, Queen Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil, carried out an investigation into the international law of the Atlantic, and firmly told the Spanish ambassador that the pope had had no authority for his award. In any case there had long been a tradition, tenaciously held by French Huguenot seamen, who dismissed Catholic claims on principle, that the normal rules of peace and war were suspended beyond a certain imaginary line running down the mid-Atlantic. This line was even more vague than the pope’s original award, and no one knew exactly where it was. But the theory, and indeed the practice, of ‘No Peace Beyond the Line’ was a 16th-century fact of life.12 It is very significant indeed that, almost from its origins, the New World was widely regarded as a hemisphere where the rule of law did not apply and where violence was to be expected.

Cassidy had been created by Clarence Mulford, writer of formula western novels and pulpy short stories. In the stories, Cassidy was a snorting, drinking, chewing relic of the Old West. Harry Sherman changed all that when he bought the character for the movies. Sherman hired Boyd, a veteran of the silent screen whose star had faded, to play a badman in the original film. But Boyd seemed more heroic, and Sherman switched the parts before the filming began. As Cassidy, Boyd became a knight of the range, a man of morals who helped ladies cross the street but never stooped to kiss the heroine. He was literally black and white, his silver hair a vivid contrast to his black getup. He did not smoke, believed absolutely in justice, honor, and fair play, and refused to touch liquor. Boyd’s personal life was not so noble. Born in Ohio in 1898, he had arrived in Hollywood for the first golden age, working with Cecil B. DeMille in a succession of early silents. By the mid-1920s he was a major star. Wine, women, and money were his: he drank and gambled, owned estates, married five times. But it all ended when another actor named William Boyd was arrested for possession of whiskey and gambling equipment.

Cecil: “A cup of love is greater than a pitcher full of ambition.

This was the first example of another interesting pattern in Elizabeth’s life. Lacking parents, lacking close family, unmarried as she would remain, and childless too, Elizabeth when queen surrounded herself with brilliant men, loyal advisors and favourites whom she made as close as family to her. When they became too old, as did William Cecil, Lord Burghley, or died, like Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, she took on their sons.

It is not to be imagined that William entered on this new chapter of his wedded life with rosy expectations. However, he had long ago given up expecting much of anything. Drama, as usually happens in real life, had ended not in tragic denouement, but in lassitude and anti-climax. In pity, in exasperation, in ironical apathy, he settled down to his accustomed round.

Cecile carried on a full conversation, on and on

The one area in which some women can claim a degree of parity is in literature. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are making their biggest impression through translations, for noble and gentry families choose to educate their daughters in languages and music above all other things. The daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke are foremost among these. The formidable Anne, who marries Sir Nicholas Bacon, publishes a translation from the Latin of no less a work than John Jewel’s Apologie of the Church of England in 1564. Her sister, Mildred, the wife of Sir William Cecil, can speak Greek as fluently as English and translates several works. Another of Sir Anthony’s daughters, Elizabeth, Lady Russell, publishes her translation from the French of A Way of Reconciliation touching the true nature and substance of the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament; and a fourth daughter, Katherine, is renowned for her ability to translate from the Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Other families also produce female scholars. Mary Bassett, granddaughter of Sir Thomas More, is well-versed in the classics and translates works by Eusebius, Socrates and several other ancient writers, not to mention a book by her grandfather. Jane, Lady Lumley, publishes a translation of Euripides. Margaret Tyler publishes The Mirror of Princely deeds and Knighthood (1578), translated from the Spanish. And so on. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are far freer to reveal the fruits of their intellect than their mothers and grandmothers.

Martin Frobisher was arrested more than once as a pirate in the 1560s, but he was later hired by the Queen’s top advisor, William Cecil, as a ship’s captain for the Crown.

This was William Cecil, who had first entered politics as Somerset’s secretary and then become Elizabeth’s steward.

So, on the afternoon that Robert Frost’s horse had clip-clopped through the snow, I’d raised my hand and told the class my mother was a poet. “Now, now, Delphine,” Mrs. Peterson said, “nice girls don’t tell their classmates lies.” She’d kept me after school and told me she knew the truth about how my mother had left home and that wanting a mother was no excuse for dreaming one up. I couldn’t leave the classroom until I’d written “I will not tell lies in class” twenty-five times on the blackboard. And then I’d had to erase the board clean. Vonetta sulked something pitiful when Cecile told her to cut it out.

Some well-educated people simply can’t “think” in Arabic numbers: Sir William Cecil translates all the figures supplied to him in Arabic back into Roman numerals when forming government policy.13

Elizabeth’s chief minister and leading adviser for forty years, William Cecil, was her antagonist.

dustpan that he emptied into a larger trash can. If I were him, picking up after people who carelessly dropped stuff on the ground, I’d be nothing but angry. They call it littering when you carelessly drop things. They call the careless folks who drop things by a cute name: litterbug. There’s nothing cute about dropping things carelessly. Dropping garbage and having puppies shouldn’t be called the same thing. “Litter.” I had a mind to write to Miss Webster about that. Puppies don’t deserve to be called a litter like they had been dropped carelessly like garbage. And people who litter shouldn’t be given a cute name for what they do. And at least the mother of a litter sticks around and nurses her pups no matter how sharp their teeth are. Merriam Webster was falling down on the job. How could she have gotten this wrong? Vonetta asked me again. Not because she was anxious to meet Cecile. Vonetta asked again so she could have her routine rehearsed in her head—her curtsy, smile, and greeting—leaving Fern and me to stand around like dumb dodos. She was practicing her role as the cute, bouncy pup in the litter and asked yet again, “Delphine, what do we call her?” A large white woman came and stood before us, clapping her hands like we were on display at the Bronx Zoo. “Oh, my. What adorable dolls you are. My, my.” She warbled like an opera singer. Her face was moon full and jelly soft, the cheeks and jaw framed by white whiskers. We said nothing. “And so well behaved.” Vonetta perked up to out-pretty and out-behave us. I did as Big Ma had told me in our many talks on how to act around white people. I said, “Thank you,” but I didn’t add the “ma’am,” for the whole “Thank you, ma’am.” I’d never heard anyone else say it in Brooklyn. Only in old movies on TV. And when we drove down to Alabama. People say “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am” in Alabama all the time. That old word was perfectly fine for Big Ma. It just wasn’t perfectly fine for me.

moment.’ She smiled. ‘How old are you, Ned?’ ‘Nineteen.’ ‘You risked your life for me.’ She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips briefly but tenderly. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Then she left the room. * MOST PEOPLE BATHED twice a year, in spring and autumn, but princesses were fastidious, and Elizabeth bathed more often. It was a major operation, with maidservants carrying big two-handled laundry tubs of hot water from the kitchen fire to her bedchamber, hurrying up the stairs before the water cooled. She took a bath the day after Swithin’s visit, as if to wash away her disgust. She had said no more about Swithin, after kissing Ned, but Ned thought he had won her trust. Ned knew he had made an enemy of a powerful earl, but he hoped it would not last: Swithin was quick-tempered and vengeful but, Ned thought, he had a short attention span. With luck he would nurse his grudge against Ned only until a better one came along. Sir William Cecil had arrived shortly after Swithin left, and next morning he got down to work with Ned. Cecil’s office was in the same wing as Elizabeth’s private suite. He sent Ned to Tom Parry’s office to fetch a ledger of expenditure for another house Elizabeth owned. Coming back with the heavy book in his hand, Ned walked along Elizabeth’s corridor, where the floorboards were puddled with water spilled by the maids. As he passed her suite, he saw that the door was open, and – stupidly – he glanced in. Elizabeth had just got out of her bath. The tub itself was screened off, but she had stepped across the room to pick up a large white linen sheet with which to dry herself. There should have been a maid waiting beside the tub holding

During the second half of the nineteenth century’, wrote Gilbert’s younger brother Cecil, ‘the middle class was absolutely bubbling over with ideas…. It was rioting in its new-found intellectual liberty as heartily as the men of the Restoration rioted in their new-found moral liberty. Everywhere you found households where new theories of politics, philosophy, religion, or science were eagerly welcomed, debated, and

Cecile

(To his son Robert): I advise thee not to affect or neglect popularity too much. Seek not to be Essex; shun to be Raleigh.

She refused to call Fern by her name, and that made Big Ma right about Cecile.

I knew my father and stepmother would be thoroughly amazed, and my mother would see the act of man landing on the moon as cause to write an oppressed woman’s poem. There was nothing Cecile couldn’t turn into a poem.

Cecile liked the quiet. It was one thing I remembered from being little and sitting with her in our house on Herkimer Street. The quiet kept her calm.

I helped Big Ma make breakfast while she muttered angry words about my mother being in the house she was born in and how her own mother called Cecile “daughter” and took Cecile’s side over hers. I don’t know how Uncle Darnell got my mother back in the house, talking to Big Ma, and then sitting at the table, but there she was, ready to eat and unbothered by Big Ma, who was still muttering and serving.

I was only looking out for you,” I began. “Well, don’t, Delphine. I can look out for myself.” She clunked her turtle head, a hard “Surely can.” Fern was the baby I saw coming out of Cecile on the kitchen floor. She clung to me and hid behind me practically every day after that. I didn’t believe Fern could look out for herself without me but I still said, “Okay.

I kept thinking about my mother and what she wrote to me. If Cecile could keep her craziness inside of her and walk into a place where she wasn’t welcomed by everyone, and see Pa with the woman he married and their baby on the way, then I could keep a lid on it where Vonetta was concerned.

That night I wrote to Cecile. If anyone understood things about books, my mother did. ... I must have scribbled without stopping. I couldn’t wait to tell her how much I’d grown that day. And that my teacher read a book by Chinwa Acheevie. That I planned to read Things Fall Apart as soon as I finished reading Ginger Pye.

As we walked toward the door, he said, “Delphine, you need to also know you’re a lady. It’s always a lady’s choice and never the other way around." I didn’t know if he was telling me how to behave at the dance or if he was telling me why he and Cecile never married. I still said, “I know, Papa,” just the right way, although I didn’t know a thing.

All I knew about my parents was that Pa took Cecile in when she was sleeping on a park bench. They had us, and Pa painted the walls every time Cecile wrote on them. Then she left us after Fern was born. Pa wore his long face every day after that for seven years.