Richard Selzer Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth.

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.

A minor operation is one that is done on someone else

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

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

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