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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian.

— John Updike Couples (1968)

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More quotes by John Updike

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Buchanan Dying : A Play (1974)

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

On T. S. Eliot (1984)

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Updike (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.