Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon (1959)

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Don't misunderstand me," I said. "Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.

Daniel Keyes
No one really starts anything new, Mrs Nemur. Everyone builds on other men's failures. There is nothing really original in science. What each man contributes to the sum of knowledge is what counts.

Daniel Keyes
The foolish thing was trying to solve the problem all by myself. But the deeper I get tangled up in this mass of dreams and memories the more I realize that emotional problems can't be solved as intellectual problems are.

Daniel Keyes
Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed.

Daniel Keyes
I can't afford to spend my time with anyone - there's only enough left for myself

Daniel Keyes
Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men.

Daniel Keyes
As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other's hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing.

Daniel Keyes
I've got to grow up. For me it means everything...

Daniel Keyes
I'm exceptional - a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of gifted and deprived (which used to mean bright and retarded) and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they'll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody. Exceptional refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I've been exceptional.

Daniel Keyes
Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts the most.

Daniel Keyes
Intelligence alone doesn't mean a damned thing. Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge, have all become great idols. But I know now there's one thing you've all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn.

Daniel Keyes
The meaning of my total existence involves knowing the possibilities of my future as well as my past, where I'm going as well as where I've been.

Daniel Keyes
There are so many doors to open. I am impatient to begin." —Charlie Gordan

Daniel Keyes
You don't know what it's like to have something happening inside you, that you can't see and can't control, and know it's all slipping through your fingers.

Daniel Keyes
So many of the ideas on which our psychologists base their beliefs about human intelligence, memory, and learning are all wishful thinking.

Daniel Keyes
My most absorbing interests at the present time are etymologies of ancient languages, the newer works on the calculus of variations, and Hindu history. It's amazing the way things, apparently disconnected, hang together.

Daniel Keyes
Because I want to see. I've got to know what's going to happen while I'm still enough in control to be able to do something about it.

Daniel Keyes
I am not only a thing, but also a way of being — one of many ways — and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.

Daniel Keyes
Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.

Daniel Keyes
So this is how a person can come to despise himself-knowing he's doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.

Daniel Keyes
The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other - child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway towards the goal-box of solitary death.

Daniel Keyes
I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out forthemselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of writtencommunication. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less-filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of the grunt.

Daniel Keyes
We learn what something is not — and that is as important as a positive discovery to the man who is going to pick up from there. At least he knows what not to do.

Daniel Keyes
Remembering how my mother looked before she gave birth to my sister is frightening. But even more frightening is the feeling that I wanted them to catch me and beat me. Why did I want to be punished? Shadows out of the past clutch at my legs and drag me down. I open my mouth to scream, but I am voiceless. My hands are trembling, I feel cold, and there is a distant humming in my ears.

Daniel Keyes
How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man with low intelligence.

Daniel Keyes
If your smart you can have lots of frends to talk to and you never get lonley by yourself all the time.

Daniel Keyes
When he admitted this to me, I found myself almost annoyed. It was as if he'd hidden this part of himself in order to deceive me, pretending— as do many people I've discovered—to be what he is not. No one I've ever known is what he appears to be on the surface.

Daniel Keyes
I'm not close to him." He looked at me defiantly. "But he's put his whole life into this. He's no Freud or Jung or Pavlov or Watson, but he's doing something important and I respect his dedication - maybe even more because he's just an ordinary man trying to do a great man's work, while the great men are all busy making bombs.

Daniel Keyes
People resent being shown that they don't approach the complexities of the problem — they don't know what exists beyond the surface ripples.

Daniel Keyes
Thank God for books and music and things I can think about." —Charlie Gordan

Daniel Keyes