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Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

— John Updike Buchanan Dying : A Play (1974)

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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.