Richard Selzer Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

To palm a fevered brow, to feel a thin wavering pulse at the wrist, to draw down a pale lower lid — these simple acts cause a doctor's heart to expand.... Add to this the possibility of the grace of healing, and there is no human contact more beautiful.

Richard Selzer
What man does not ponder the whereabouts of his skeleton — the place where it will lie? Say what you will, all sanitary and pragmatic considerations aside, these jaunty saunterers that have held us upright, have stiffened us against the grate and grind of life, are dear to us. What stands closer to a man all his days than his bones?

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
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
One enters the body in surgery, as in love, as though one were an exile returning at last to his hearth, daring uncharted darkness in order to reach home.

Richard Selzer
I sing of skin, layered fine as baklava, whose colors shame the dawn, at once the scabbard upon which is writ our only signature, and the instrument by which we are thrilled, protected, and kept constant in our natural place. Here is each man bagged and trussed in perfect amiability.

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

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
When bombs are falling and grenades are being thrown, the body is in the business of burrowing, ducking, scurrying.

Richard Selzer
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. I think that if years later I were to see the trace from an old incision of mine, I should know it at once, as one recognizes his pet expressions.

Richard Selzer
I think my writing is antique, of the past, not of modern tongue. The imagery is baroque, full of metaphors and similes. It's my way, and I couldn't do it any other way.

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
It is trust, not gratitude or worship, that animates the physician.

Richard Selzer
I believe, and I hope it doesn't sound immodest, that I am the first one of my kind; that there were no other doctors or surgeons who wrote the kind of things that I've been doing.

Richard Selzer
I never intended to become a writer, I love to grab a big armful of language and revel in it.

Richard Selzer
Many criticize me as an irresponsible journalist, but I am neither.

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

Richard Selzer
The grist for my mill is the human body and the art of healing. If I quit surgery, I'd be afraid I'd dry up.

Richard Selzer
I came by the horror naturally. Surgery is the one branch of medicine that is the most violent. After all, it's violent to take up a knife and cut open a person's body and rummage around with your hands. I think I was attracted to the horrific.

Richard Selzer
That night it rained a light rain and he started by thinking about his honeymoon with Kate, a time that was all rain and all pleasure, the deepest he had known.

Richard Selzer
The gardens of my heart are not found in the country, nor even small towns and villages. It is in great cities that the oases of the spirit lie, in cities, bridged and tunneled, and with pavement planted.

Richard Selzer
Korea. The name reminded him of a disease, chorea, characterized by aimless jerky movements of the body: St.Vitus Dance.

Richard Selzer