“The following is a fictionalized and utterly false account of the events that most definitely did not happen on June 9-10, 1967. And yet, while all the characters in this story are little green men and women running around inside my head, the events that served as inspiration, the historical facts, as it were, must be considered no less than a sibling of the tale contained in these pages: the story I didn't write, but could have written--the book this could have been, but isn't.”

“The following is a fictionalized and utterly false account of the events that most definitely did not happen on June 9-10, 1967. And yet, while all the characters in this story are little green men and women running around inside my head, the events that served as inspiration, the historical facts, as it were, must be considered no less than a sibling of the tale contained in these pages: the story I didn't write, but could have written--the book this could have been, but isn't.”

“We have been gradually finding out that there is more democracy in letting a committee or representative ten to details than in making everybody's business nobody's business.”

“New Englanders began the Revolution not to institute reforms and changes in the order of things, but to save the institutions and customs that already had become old and venerable with them; and were new only to a few stupid Englishmen a hundred and fifty years behind the times.”

“There have been some medical schools in which somewhere along the assembly line, a faculty member has informed the students, not so much by what he said but by what he did, that there is an intimate relation between curing and caring.”

“Wit in women is apt to have bad consequences; like a sword without a scabbard, it wounds the wearer and provokes assailants.”

“One goes through school, college, medical school and one's internship learning little or nothing about goodness but a good deal about success.”

“The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.”

“The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.”

“The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.”

“She was an aging singer who had to take every note above 'A' with her eyebrows.”

“Today while the titular head of the family may still be the father everyone knows that he is little more than chairman at most of the entertainment committee.”