Richard Selzer > Quotes

“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, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery

“You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.”
― Richard Selzer, Letters To A Young Doctor

“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, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery

“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, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery

“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.”
― Richard Selzer

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

“One holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello or a tulip-by-the stem. Not palmed not gripped not grasped, but lightly, with the tips of the finger. The knife is not for pressing. It is for drawing across the field of skin. Like a slender fish, it waits at the ready, then go! It darts, followed by a thin wake of red. The flesh parts, falling away to yellow globules of fat. Even now, after so many times, I still marvel at its power-cold, gleaming, silent. More, I am still struck with a kind of dread that it is I whose hand the blade travels, that my hand is its vehicle, that yet again, this steel-bellied thing and I have conspired for a most unnatural purpose, the laying open of a body of a human being.
Richard Selzer: Down from Troy”
― Richard Selzer

“Precisely because she had tended and pitied, the desolation is hers as well.”
― Richard Selzer, Letters To A Young Doctor

“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.”
― Richard Selzer, Letters To A Young Doctor

“Within the jaws of my hemostat is the whole of the evil of the world, the dark concentrate itself, and I shall kill it. For mankind. And, in so doing, will open the way into a thousand years of perfect peace. Here is Surgeon as Savoir indeed.
Tight grip now ... steady, relentless pull. How it scrabbles to keep its tentacle-hold. With an abrupt moist plop the extraction is complete. There, writhing in the teeth of the clamp, is a dirty gray body, the size and shape of an English walnut. He is hung everywhere with tiny black hooklets. Quickly ... into the specimen jar of saline ... the lid screwed tight. Crazily he swims round, wiping his slimy head against the glass, then slowly sinks to the bottom, the mass of hooks in frantic agonal wave.”
― Richard Selzer

“There was a Temple of Asclepius in Greece which was one of the most beautiful in the country, and it was there that sick people came from all over. They were told to lie down on pallets on a great veranda, called the abaton, outside of the temple. The priests would walk in bearing bowls of fire, and the patients were commanded to sleep. There were serpents—a species of large yellowish snake—that were given free run of the temple grounds. The patients were told that when they went to sleep in the temple they would dream, and in their dreams Asclepius would appear to them in the form of a serpent. So, that’s the way they were healed: they were healed by dreaming.

Now, science and technology—all of our medical advances—notwithstanding, I think that was a superior way to be healed—by a whole lot—than by going in and having, say, open heart surgery. The Greeks healed by dreaming! We’ve never reached those heights in medicine since. There are many testimonials by patients, carved into the stellae, these stone pillars, attributing their cures to this experience of being touched by the serpents in their dreams.”
― Richard Selzer