25 Quotes by Richard Selzer

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The grist for my mill is the human body and the art of healing.

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