Richard Selzer Quotes

#1. Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth.

Richard Selzer

#2. Surgery is the red flower that blooms among the leaves and thorns that are the rest of medicine.

Richard Selzer

#3. The grist for my mill is the human body and the art of healing.

Richard Selzer

#4. You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.

Richard Selzer

#5. You do not die all at once. Some tissues live on for minutes, even hours, giving still their little cellular shrieks, molecular echoes of the agony of the whole corpus.

Richard Selzer

#6. Thus is the fruit of the Earth taken, its flesh torn. Thus is it given over standing, toward rot. It is the principle of corruption, the death of what is, the birth of what is to be. You are wine.

Richard Selzer

#7. If people understood that doctors weren't divine, perhaps the odor of malpractice might diminish.

Richard Selzer

#8. If I quit surgery, I'd be afraid I'd dry up.

Richard Selzer

#9. Each is like a river that leaves behind its name and shape, the whole course of its path , to vanish into the vast sea of God.

Richard Selzer

#10. There are no "great" subjects for the creative writer; there are only the singular details of a single human life.

Richard Selzer

#11. And If the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.

Richard Selzer

#12. The liver, that great maroon snail: No wave of emotion sweeps it. Neither music nor mathematics gives it pause in its appointed tasks.

Richard Selzer

#13. A minor operation is one that is done on someone else

Richard Selzer

#14. You will see at precisely what moment the writer ceases to think of his character as an instrument to be manipulated and think of him as someone with whom he has fallen in love. For it is always, must always be, a matter of love.

Richard Selzer

#15. The heart is pure theater throbbing in its cage palpably as any nightingale.

Richard Selzer

#16. I never intended to become a writer.

Richard Selzer

#17. I contemplate the body, dead and diseased as well as alive and healthy.

Richard Selzer

#18. A man does not know whose hands will stroke from him the last bubbles of his life. That alone should make him kinder to strangers.

Richard Selzer

#19. The surgeon knows all the parts of the brain but he does not know his patient's dreams.

Richard Selzer