Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

At midnight I looked about to discover that I was the oldest living human being in the world. A twinge of shame. I should be at home, I thought, in my slippers and my bronchitic scarf.

Precisely because she had tended and pitied, the desolation is hers as well.

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.

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

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.