Richard Selzer Quotes

I never intended to become a writer. ~ Richard Selzer

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

A minor operation is one that is done on someone else ~ Richard Selzer

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

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

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. ~ Richard Selzer

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

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

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

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. ~ Richard Selzer

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

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. ~ Richard Selzer

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

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

What Richard Selzer, M.D. once wrote of surgery is true of therapy: only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen. ~ Thomas Lewis

Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth. ~ Richard Selzer

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

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

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

Love is luring us forward ... to the fullness of our own being ~ Richard Rohr

There's some things even Enlightenment won't change. If you're a son-of-a-bitch before you visit the Absolute, you'll still be a son-of-bitch after. ~ Richard Rose

For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause ... There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust. ~ Richard Perle

Look at the Justice Department, it's full of Jews ... The lawyers in government are damn Jews. ~ Richard M. Nixon

Her hand had a lot of strength gained through the process of gentleness. ~ Richard Brautigan

To those who would call me a thug or worse because I show passion on a football field - don't judge a person's character by what they do between the lines. Judge a man by what he does off the field, what he does for his community, what he does for his family. ~ Richard Sherman

As worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience. Holy obedience saves worship from becoming an opiate, an escape from the pressing needs of modern life. ~ Richard J. Foster

I'm not a terribly social person, and so I have to really like people to work with them. ~ Richard Ayoade

Getting down to the nitty-gritty, most people are motivated by unconscious motives most of the time. ~ Richard J. Mayer

A commune of library employees in Moscow created an "extreme" commune in which all clothing - including undergarments - was collectivized. According to Mehnert, if a communard preferred to wear his or her own underclothes "it would be characterized as a backslide into darkest capitalism; as prejudice originating in a petit-bourgeois ideology". ~ Richard Stites

The best we can do is live our highest right, gracefully as we can, and let the Principle of Coincidence take it from there. Seven ~ Richard Bach

Ethanol is a premier, high performance fuel. It has tremendous environmental benefits and is a key component to energy independence for our country. ~ Richard Lugar

Richard." Her voice was surprisingly strong. She could do this. She could tell him the truth, and then get the hell out of here.
Back on a plane.
Back home.
Back to him.
"Richard, we had a baby. ~ Carrie Elks

War is like any other bad relationship. Of course you want out, but at what price? And perhaps more importantly, once you get out, will you be any better off?
- Quellcrist Falconer ~ Richard K. Morgan

I love Las Vegas because it's the one city less classy than Los Angeles. ~ J. Richard Singleton

And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn't be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can't fix anyway. Telling ~ Richard Ford

Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop,sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop ~ Richard Dawkins

If you can truly believe what you are pretending to do is really happening, then your audience will believe it, too. ~ Richard Osterlind

At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument. ~ Richard Ford

In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society. ~ Richard K. Morgan

Emus are little more than feathered stomachs borne on mighty legs and ruled by a tiny brain. If an emu wants one of your sandwiches, he will get it, and then run away. He cannot help you with your sudoku. ~ Richard Fortey

Henry's Understanding
He was reading late, at Richard's, down in Maine,
aged 32? Richard & Helen long in bed,
my good wife long in bed.
All I had to do was strip & get into my bed,
putting the marker in the book, & sleep,
& wake to a hot breakfast.
Off the coast was an island, P'tit Manaan,
the bluff from Richard's lawn was almost sheer.
A chill at four o'clock.
It only takes a few minutes to make a man.
A concentration upon now & here.
Suddenly, unlike Bach,
& horribly, unlike Bach, it occurred to me
that one night, instead of warm pajamas,
I'd take off all my clothes
& cross the damp cold lawn & down the bluff
into the terrible water & walk forever
under it out toward the island. ~ John Berryman

Natural healing has the power to cure pancreatic cancer. But usually, before I see the patient, medical treatments - not the disease - have destroyed the patient's body. ~ Richard M. Schulze

Beauty - what is beauty, forsooth? Form and color; that is, surface only. Fortune - what is fortune? Nothing is ever a pleasure or a real profit to him who has to labour for it. Truth - you die in the pursuit, and the sea beats the beach as it did a thousand years ago. The stolid are alone happy. ~ Richard Jefferies

Max would conclude, that's who I want to be. The pope. And I'll do the same thing he does. I'll keep all the goddamn money. ~ Richard Russo

I think I got really lucky with Slacker. That was a film that probably shouldn't have been seen. ~ Richard Linklater

If you're given champagne at lunch, there's a catch somewhere. ~ Richard Lyons, 1st Viscount Lyons

You have to remove your human sentiment when it comes to greed and the accumulation of wealth. ~ Richard Armitage

History will treat me fairly. Historians probably won't, because most historians are on the left. ~ Richard M. Nixon

Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn, what I lost to find this ~ Richard Brautigan

Everything you've said, everything you want to believe is already true. You may not find some of it for a while, and some of it might take longer than that, but that doesn't stop it from being true this minute! ~ Richard Bach

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case, get it out of the science classroom and send it back to church, where it belongs. ~ Richard Dawkins

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness ~ Richard Wright

I swim in a pool of my own neurosis. I carry love, grief deeply, like an Irishman. ~ Richard Harris

You must test your own religious claims and texts by the same standards you apply to other religions. If your religion's claims and texts fair no better, then your religion is just as false as theirs is. ~ Richard Carrier

I get it," Richard said. "But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods? ~ Neal Stephenson

I think life is self-examination. Certainly the voyage that one takes. ~ Richard Gere

The real objective isn't just "knowledge" or getting an 80-20 understanding of the situation. The overriding objective is engagement, creating a buzz, mobilizing people to take action. ~ Richard Pascale

Supremely, spiritual directors/mentors/pastors are persons who have a sense of being 'established' in God. Otherwise they are too dangerous to be allowed into the soul space of others. ~ Richard Foster

I must warn you, my story isn't a pretty one: abductions, time-traveling dragons, the Order of the Black Fez, highly verbal cats, a secret invisible city, condescending robots (condescending means they talk to you like you're an Idiot; wait, is it condescending of me to explain what condescending means?), and that's just for starters. - Willa Snap ~ Richard Due

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. ~ Richard Feynman

When we first got together, one of the things me and Judy had in common was a passion for the correct use of the apostrophe ~ Richard Madeley

The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets. ~ Richard Engel

There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified "educations" is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An "education" that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must "teach" by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny. ~ Richard Mitchell

Christendom has often achieved apparent success by ignoring the precepts of its founder. ~ H. Richard Niebuhr