Unquotable
Quotes by L. Williams
(Compiled by His Students)
"It's
soporific!"
" Anyone? Anyone?"
" For the geeks
in chemistry..."
" I just go slow,
it's my nature."
" Son of a gun,
it works like a charm!"
" Well, if you're
a mechanism hound..."
" Gee whiz!...Sorry
that's the way I talk."
" Acid/base chemistry
is way, way faster."
" Holy mackerel!
Look at all that spinach!"
" It is on the board
but somebody is erasing it."
" If you could do
that, you would be really cool!"
" I like to keep
my notes as cryptic as possible."
" Does this seem
like too much arrow business?"
" I want to remind
you - before we get too crazy!"
" You still have
to know the whole wicked mechanism."
" The logic is really
beauitful, if you're gross in that way."
" I'm sorry. I'm
such an idiot. I'm getting ahead of myself."
"I know it sounds
absurd, but I said it that way on purpose."
" Not everyone can
hear his question, so I'm going to ignore it."
" I'm such a space-cadet...I
have no idea where my notes went."
" What I say in
the next few minutes might blow your mind away."
" You could just
puzzle over it all day, and I invite you to
do that."
" You can wander
through chemistry like you wander through a good quality Swiss
cheese."
" Do you guys mind
me saying something? I know it makes no sense."
" ...Really, really
cool--if you don't mind me saying cool in the
classroom."
" Aldol reactions
come in two flavors: Aldol Addition and Aldol
Condensation."
" In the second
case you might be able to discern that I haven't
written everything on the board."
" There is something
very important that I wanted to say...and I'll
probably remember it in just a second."
" I have a bottle
of sodium borohydride in my lab, because hey,
any organic chemist who's worth anything has
one."