Richard Selzer Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

I never intended to become a writer.

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

Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth.

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

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

A minor operation is one that is done on someone else

I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stand on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? The young woman speaks, "Will my mouth always be like this?" she asks. "Yes," I say, "it will. It is because the nerve was cut." She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. "I like it," he says, "It is kind of cute." "All at once I know who he is. I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.

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.

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

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

He knows that there is something wrong, forbidden in what he is about to do, but he cannot help himself, for he is a fanatic. He is driven by a dark desire. To see, to feel, to discover is all. His is a passion, not a romance.

The Country Doctor Revisited is a fine achievement. Purporting to be an overview of the practice of medicine in rural areas, it is a splendid portrait of the practice of medicine everywhere. The special conditions that prevail in the countryside as opposed to the cities are examined, and each of these is illustrated by a case history that is as compelling as it is informative. It is presented in a highly readable form that would be accessible to the general public as well as to the deliverers of health care. I recommend it most highly.

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.