Buck Quotes - page 5
Every year I started Ulysses, but I could not get beyond the first chapter - "stately, plump Buck Mulligan" - page 47, I think it was. Then one day, long after, in a different apartment, with a different man (which?), I found myself on page 48 and never looked back. This happened with many of us: Ulysses gradually - but with an effect of suddenness - became accessible. It was because in the interim we had been reading diluted Joyce in writers like Faulkner and so had got used to his ways, at second remove.
Mary McCarthy
You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. Compassion is all to the good, but vindictiveness is the verity Faulkner forgot: the organic force in every creative effort, from the poetry of Villon to the Brinks Express Robbery, that gives shape and color to all our dreams. [...] A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn't out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even. And, of course, neither will.
Nelson Algren
Even if it ain't sunny, hey, I ain't complaining I'm in the rain doing a buck 40, hydroplaning, what, shorty? (Where you disappear to, son?) Maintaining Putting myself in a position most of these rappers ain't in I'm living, the ill street blues got you hunger painin' Nothing to gain and a whole lot to lose, you still singing, fool I'm thorough, in every borough, my name be ringing.
Jay-Z
When a leader correctly identifies real hurt and insecurity in our country, and instead of addressing it, goes to look for someone to blame, there is perhaps nothing more devastating to a pluralistic society. Leadership knows that most often a good place to start in assigning blame is to look somewhat closer to home. Leadership knows where the buck stops.
Humility helps, character counts. Leadership does not knowingly encourage or feed ugly or debased appetites in us. Leadership lives by the American creed, "E pluribus unum." From many one. American leadership looks to the world and just as Lincoln did, sees the family of man. Humanity is not a zero sum game. When we have been at our most prosperous, we have been at our most principled, and when we do well, the rest of the world does well.
Jeff Flake
