Kenneth Williams Quotes

There is no possible idea," Kenneth thought as he came onto the terrace, "to which the mind of man can't supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act.

Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!

(Sunday, 20 March 1988) Oh! to be out of it for ever! To cease upon the midnight with no pain. Why do I linger? Not from love of life, I've always found it awful... no, it's rather from a sense of curiosity... not wanting to miss the third act.

Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!

(Tuesday, 22 January 1985) Providing there is no pain I shall be happy to go when the time comes; nothing here has really delighted me except Art, the life-experience itself has no fascination for me and the very sight of active humanity invariably fills me with nausea.

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof. JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, AMERICAN ECONOMIST   The

(Tuesday, 21 April 1964) They needn't talk to me about loneliness. I've walked too many miles of pavement. I've scanned so many faces - I've looked with so much furtive hope, but it's never right. Only in my imagination. There, I have marvellous conversations with someone attractive, slow, charmingly phlegmatic & naturally reticent, and with me, he becomes articulate. But in fact, I take a sleeping pill & tell myself to shut up.

Thomas B. Costain, Herman Wouk, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kenneth Roberts, Edna Ferber, Sholem Asch, Ben Ames Williams, Frederic Wakeman, Frances Parkinson Keyes, Irwin Shaw, Budd Schulberg, Hamilton Basso, and, of course, Samuel Shellabarger.

… the countryside and the village are symbols of stability and security, of order. Yet they are also, as I have noted, liminal spaces, at a very narrow remove from the atavistic Wild. Arcadia is not the realm even of Giorgione and of Claude, with its cracked pillars and thunderbolts, its lurking banditti; still less is it Poussin’s sun-dappled and regularised realm of order, where, although the lamb may be destined for the altar and the spit, all things proceed with charm and gravity and studied gesture; least of all is it the degenerate and prettified Arcady of Fragonard and Watteau, filled with simpering courtier-Corydons, pallid Olympians, and fat-arsed putti. (It is only family piety that prevents me from taking a poker to an inherited coffee service in gilt porcelain with bastardised, deutero-Fragonard scenes painted on the sides of every damned thing. Cue Wallace Greenslade: ‘… “Round the Horne”, with Marie Antoinette as the dairymaid and Kenneth Williams as the manager of the camp-site….’) No: Arcadia is the very margin of the liminal space between the safe tilth and the threatening Wild, in which Pan lurks, shaggy and goatish, and Death proclaims, from ambush, et in Arcadia ego. Arcadia is not the Wide World nor the Riverbank, but the Wild Wood. And in that wood are worse than stoats and weasels, and the true Pan is no Francis of Assisi figure, sheltering infant otters. The Wild that borders and penetrates Arcady is red in tooth and claw.

It was William Penn who said, “Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.” Brent knew that there was nothing right about this place and the way the prisoners were treated, and he was determined to do whatever he could to change that.

The need to cry, like a child, for all the stupid wasting of the thousand chances life has offered me. O! for the real courage to speak out bravely, to do one decisive, unselfish, and creative deed. Instead of watching the sand run through the glass and let the time trickle through one's hands...

(Tuesday, 1 October 1968) Why oh! why did I keep on postponing experiences until it was too late to have them? I'm like someone who wanted - indeed ached to swim, but never dared put my foot in the water. Just sat and watched others doing it, till eventually the very idea of the water is alien and frightening. I am the living proof of the futility of thought without action.

Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing attaches a form to a file. Ann Williams turns a page. Anand Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which makes a slightly different sound. David Cusk turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages of two separate files at the same time. Ken Wax turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Chris Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ann Williams sniffs slightly and turns a page. Meredith Rand does something to a cuticle. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Kenneth ‘Type of Thing’ Hindle detaches a Memo 402-C(1) from a file. ‘Second-Knuckle’ Bob McKenzie looks up briefly while turning a page. David Cusk turns a page. A yawn proceeds across one Chalk’s row by unconscious influence. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Rotes Group Room 2 hushed and brightly lit, half a football field in length. Howard Cardwell shifts slightly in his chair and turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. traces his jaw’s outline with his ring finger. Ed Shackleford turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Ken Wax attaches a Memo 20 to a file. Anand Singh turns a page. Jay Landauer and Ann Williams turn a page almost precisely in sync although they are in different rows and cannot see each other. Boris Kratz bobs with a slight Hassidic motion as he crosschecks a page with a column of figures. Ken Wax turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. Ambient room temperature 80° F. Sandra Pounder makes a minute adjustment to a file so that the page she is looking at is at a slightly different angle to her. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Each Tingle’s two-tiered hemisphere of boxes. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Six wigglers per Chalk, four Chalks per Team, six Teams per group. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Plus administration and support. Bob McKenzie turns a page. Anand Singh turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Ken Wax turns a page. Chris ‘The Maestro’ Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Boris Kratz turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages. Anand Singh turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown uncrosses his legs and turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. The slow squeak of the cart boy’s cart at the back of the room. Ken Wax places a file on top of the stack in the Cart-Out box to his upper right. Jay Landauer turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page and then folds over the page of a computer printout that’s lined up next to the original file he just turned a page of. Ken Wax turns a page. Bob Mc-Kenzie turns a page. Ellis Ross turns a page. Joe ‘The Bastard’ Biron-Maint turns a page. Ed Shackleford opens a drawer and takes a moment to select just the right paperclip. Olive Borden turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Paul Howe turns a page and then sniffs circumspectly at the green rubber sock on his pinkie’s tip. Olive Borden turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Devils are actually angels. Elpidia Carter and Harriet Candelaria reach up to their Cart-In boxes at exactly the same time. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. ‘Type of Thing’ Ken Hindle looks up a routing code. Some with their chin in their hand. Robert Atkins turns a page even as he’s crosschecking something on that page. Ann Williams turns a page. Ed Shackleford searches a file for a supporting document. Joe Biron-Maint turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page.

Even before that poor fool Greenspan had called it out, I’d heard her name. Who hadn’t? When I was in Chicago, she’d been denounced every day in the American newspapers. According to them, she was, among much else; a traitor, a lesbian, a German spy, a corruptor of youth. One of the taxi drivers had assured me she was a Jewish nymphomaniac and a poisoner of reservoirs. Someone else had blamed her for the new strain of locusts that was resistant to all but German pesticides. Before then, I’d read the generally shrill letters of denunciation she sent three times a week from Montreal to The Daily Telegraph. Before starting work for Richardson on that vast hymn of praise to the Führer, she’d published an equally vast cycle of plays about the trial of Anslinger after some future American uprising. A cut down version had been played at the Old Vic, with Kenneth Williams as Anslinger. The critical derision it received had only made her Telegraph philippics more demented. Of course, I knew about Ayn Rand.

Write to make a difference. Write because you have something to say to us all. In dramatic writing, fiction, and nonfiction, this means knowing exactly what your work is about and being able to tell the publisher in ten words or less. The writing must demonstrate its premise in a convincing, persuasive way. Keep your audience in mind, their needs and their desires. Journalists do this by focusing on the 5 W’s (Who, What, When, Where, Why) because they know what their readers look for. Convey emotion, break out of your academic inhibitions and psychological barriers. William Faulkner hints at this when he says, “Writing is a craft consisting of pen, paper, and whiskey.” The purpose of the whiskey is to rid the author of inhibitions.

Robin gave me a license to free myself: to want and be wanted, to dance and open up, to explore who I was in a way that Vanderveer would never allow. Robin invented an identity for me that I’d transform into when we crossed the East River into Manhattan. His name was Kenneth Banjee, and he was powerful and confident and

desirable. There was nothing insecure about Kenneth, and though it started as something of a joke, seeing myself through Robin’s eyes was transformative. You can’t be something else if you can’t even picture it. Robin saw it long before I did.

idea of Occam’s razor, a rule of thumb in problem-solving that recommends a preference for simplicity. When choosing between alternative explanations or solutions to a problem, embrace the less complicated: it will probably be more accurate than an intricate or elaborate answer with lots of parts. The idea was set forth (in a somewhat different form) by the English friar William of Ockham in the fourteenth century; the “razor” is to shave away the unnecessary to focus on the essential.

The meaning of true worship, here so simply and profoundly defined, is inexhaustible and has inspired William Temple to write: Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose— and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable.[13]

We all are works in progress. Everybody is a work in progress. —Michael Kenneth Williams

Repetition is indeed a great teacher when learning any mathematical skill.

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale." John Kenneth Galbraith quoted in Money and Power

You have to remember, William. It may make the difference between freedom and half a lifetime in prison.

Even though the Judge would charge the jury that they should listen to all the evidence before they made up their minds, the chances were likely that 100% of them will have already decided if William was guilty or not before the trial was over.

Their brothers are their heroes, and if anything happens to William Saunders or Robert Young, Kenneth and Larry might blame everyone around them, because we’re the citizens those men will have died for, and maybe they won’t believe we were worth it. Are we? Have we ever been worth it, any of the times before?

For his - it doesn’t at all matter - mercy endureth forever,” the Archdeacon concluded, with a genial smile. He seemed to be rising moment by moment into a kind of delirious delight. His eyes moved from one to the other, changing from mere laughter as he looked at the Colonel into an impish and teasing mischief for Persimmons, and showing a feeling of real affection as they rested on Kenneth, between whom and himself there had appeared the beginnings of a definite attraction and friendship. Gregory looked at him with a certain perplexity. He understood Sir Giles’ insolent rudeness, though he despised it as Giles despised his own affectation of smoothness. But he saw no reason in the Archdeacon’s amusement, and began to wonder seriously whether Ludding’s blow had affected his mind.

In his summary of these heroic efforts on the part of the behavioral geneticists to meet this frequent objection of the environmentalists [that identical (MZ) twins develop similarly because they are treated more similarly than fraternal (DZ) twins], [Kenneth] Kendler made no mention of the complete substantiation these studies have received from the Minnesota and Swedish reared-apart twin studies, which lack the potential pitfall of different MZ-DZ upbringings in the same home. He laboriously showed that the one complaint has no basis in fact. It would seem to put to rest once and for all this one complaint and force the critics to find different ones. This was not to be the case. For more than ten years after Kendler’s paper, opponents continued to cite the possibility of different upbringings given identicals as opposed to fraternals as invalidating twin studies. As late as 1994, the objection was raised in the pages of Scientific American. Sometimes the criticism is not alluded to directly. When other critics referred darkly to the “seriously flawed” nature of twin studies that compared monozygotic with dizygotic twins, more often than not the unnamed flaw turned out to be the one Kendler and others had refuted a decade earlier. And there is no possibility the critics who keep resurrecting this charge are unaware of the refutation. Each time the flaw is cited in print, a weary behavioral geneticist will write a letter to the editor pointing out the research that obviates the complaint, but the critics continue to make it year after year. As an outsider, I came into this field believing scientists were simply truth seekers, men and women dedicated to discovering the functioning of the world around them, to understanding the givens. I saw them as driven by profound curiosity. It was, therefore, disheartening for me to learn that many scientists with broad reputations do not place truth at the top of their agendas and react in sadly unscientific ways when confronted with evidence they feel threatens their ideological positions. Aware of the scientific rules, they first attempt to discredit with counterarguments, but when these are shown empirically to be invalid, they simply pretend that the evidence they were unable to shoot down doesn’t exist. Such selective memory permeates the behavioral genetics debate. In the nonscientific world we have a word for such behavior: dishonesty.

I'm too old, too tired and too talented to care!

Who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for eternity outside of time, and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decades, who cut their wrists three times succesively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried.

YouTube also contains a treasure trove of lectures by nearly all of finance’s leading lights, strewn throughout its vast wasteland of misinformation. Tread carefully. A few wrong clicks and you’ll wind up with a QAnon conspiracist or a crypto bro. Of the names I’ve mentioned in this book, I’d search for John Bogle, Eugene Fama, Kenneth French, Jonathan Clements, Zvi Bodie, William Sharpe, Burton Malkiel, Charles Ellis, and Jason Zweig. Worthwhile finance podcasts abound. Start with the Economist’s weekly “Money Talks” and NPR’s Planet Money, although most of the latter’s superb coverage revolves around economics and relatively little around investing. Rick Ferri’s Boglehead podcast interviews cover mainly passive investing. Another financial podcast I highly recommend is Barry Ritholtz’s Masters in Business from Bloomberg. Podcasts are a rapidly evolving area. Lest you wear your ears out, you’ll need discretion to curate the burgeoning amount of high-quality audio. Research mutual funds. All the fund companies discussed in this book have sophisticated websites from which basic fund facts, such as fees and expenses, can be obtained, as well as annual and semiannual reports that list and tabulate holdings. If you’re researching a large number of funds, this gets cumbersome. The best way is to visit Morningstar.com. Use the site’s search function to locate the main page for the fund you’re interested in and click the “Expense” and “Portfolio” tabs to find the fund expense ratio and detailed data on the fund holdings. Click the “Performance” tab to see the fund’s return over periods ranging from a single day up to 15 years, and the “Chart” tab to compare the returns of multiple funds over a given interval. ***

To Paraphrase William Faulkner, " In Asheville the fifteenth century is never dead. It's not even past

It was William Penn who said, “Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.

(Tuesday, 21 July 1964) I would like very much to have been born very handsome. Not for its own sake, but for the sake of being attractive to others. The reason I am so conservative in my tiny circle of friends, and the reason I stay in the house so much, is because I think my face and body unprepossessing. I've no doubt that this is only a superficial excuse for a more profound complaint within me. This is of course the paradox of my own nature. The thing that I am, being the thing which I despise. But I think my despite is justified.

En palabras de Kenneth Hagin: «Jesús probó la muerte espiritual de cada hombre. Y su Espíritu y el hombre interior fueron al infierno en mi lugar. ¿No se da cuenta? La muerte física no podía quitarle sus pecados. Él gustó la muerte por cada hombre. Él está hablando de experimentar la muerte espiritual» (Citado en Jones y Woodbridge, Health, Wealth, & Happiness, p. 70). Para un tratamiento académico completo de esta enseñanza en los círculos de Palabra de Fe, ver William P. Atkinson, The ‘Spiritual Death’ of Jesus (Leiden, Países Bajos: Brill, 2009).

Nevertheless, the list of prominent Christians who embrace old-earth creationism (OEC) is impressive. Statesmen such as Billy Graham, C. S. Lewis, and Francis Schaeffer accept or accepted an ancient earth. Theologians such as J. I. Packer, Wayne Grudem, and Millard Erickson affirm OEC. Norman Geisler, William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, and numerous other Christian philosophers all believe the earth is ancient. Pastors such as John Piper and Tim Keller hold to an ancient earth. In addition, many Old Testament scholars—including Walter Kaiser, John Sailhamer, and C. John Collins—adhere to an old universe.

Male Name-Pictures JAMES (Jim)—a Slim Jim JOHN—a toilet (my apologies to anyone named John) ROBERT (Bob)—a buoy bobbing on the water’s surface MICHAEL (Mike)—a microphone WILLIAM (Bill)—a dollar bill DAVID—a statue RICHARD—I’m sure you can think of something for this one CHARLES—a river (I’m from Boston) JOSEPH (Joe)—a cup of coffee THOMAS (Tom)—a drum CHRISTOPHER (Chris)—an “X” (like a crisscross) DANIEL (Dan)—a lion (lion’s den) PAUL—a bouncing ball MARK—a bruise (as in, “That’s gonna leave a mark!”) DONALD—a duck GEORGE—a gorge KENNETH (Ken)—a hen STEVEN (Steve)—a stove EDWARD (Ed)—a bed BRIAN—a brain RONALD (Ron)—a man running ANTHONY (Tony)—a skeleton (Bony Tony) KEVIN—the number seven JASON—a man being chased (chasin’) MATTHEW (Matt)—a welcome mat Female Name-Pictures MARY—the Virgin Mary PATRICIA (Pat)—a baseball bat LINDA—beauty crown (linda means “pretty” in Spanish) BARBARA—barbed-wire fence ELIZABETH—an ax (Lizzie Borden) JENNIFER—a heart (Jennifer Love Hewitt) MARIA—a wedding dress (as in, “I’m gonna marry ya”) SUSAN—a pair of socks (Susan sounds like “shoes and . . .”) MARGARET (Peg)—a pirate’s peg leg DOROTHY (Dot)—Dots candy LISA—the Mona Lisa NANCY—pants KAREN—a carrot BETTY—a poker chip HELEN—a demon SANDRA (Sandy)—the beach DONNA—a duck (as in, Donald) CAROL—bells (“Carol of the Bells”) RUTH—a roof SHARON—a toddler throwing a fit because she doesn’t want to share MICHELLE—a missile LAURA—an “aura” SARAH—cheerleader’s pom-poms (rah-rah!) KIMBERLY—a very burly woman named Kim DEBORAH—a bra A great way to practice this technique is to jump on Facebook and just start browsing profiles. You’ll have an endless supply of names and faces from which to try creating name-pictures and associations.