Brother Quote by Richard Selzer

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

— 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…

— Richard Selzer

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

— 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…

— Richard Selzer

A minor operation is one that is done on someone else

— 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…

— Richard Selzer

“You will see at precisely what moment the writer ceases to think of his character as an instrument to be manipulated and think of…

— Richard Selzer

Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth.

— Richard Selzer

I never intended to become a writer.

— 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

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

— Richard Selzer

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

— Richard Selzer