Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon (1959)

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The answer can't be found in books — or be solved by bringing it to other people. Not unless you want to remain a child all your life. You've got to find the answer inside you — feel the right thing to do.

Daniel Keyes
Who's to say that my light is better than your darkness? Who's to say death is better than your darkness? Who am I to say?

Daniel Keyes
How many great problems have gone unsolved because men didn't know enough, or have enough faith in the creative process and in themselves, to let go for the whole mind to work at it?

Daniel Keyes
Here look at me. I'm Charlie, the son you wrote off the books? Not that I blame you for it, but here I am, all fixed up better than ever. Test me. Ask me questions. I speak twenty languages, living and dead; I'm a mathematical whiz, and I'm writing a piano concerto that will make them remember me long after I'm gone.

Daniel Keyes
I put Algernon's body in a cheese box and buried him in the backyard. I cried.

Daniel Keyes
There are a lot of people who will give money or materials, but very few who will give time and affection.

Daniel Keyes
Just leave me alone. I'm not myself. I'm falling apart, and I don't want you here.

Daniel Keyes
How can I make him understand that he did not create me? He makes the same mistake as the others when they look at a feeble-minded person and laugh because they don't understand there are human feelings involved.

Daniel Keyes
Dr Strauss said I had something that was very good. He said I had a good motor-vation. I never ever knew I had that. I felt proud when he said that not every body with an eye-q of 68 had that thing. I don't know what it is or where I got it but he said Algernon had it too. Algernons motor-vation is the cheese they put in his box. But it can't be that because I didn't eat any cheese last week.

Daniel Keyes
What an incredible thing! How much less they had than other human beings. Mentally retarded, deaf, mute - and still eagerly sanding benches.

Daniel Keyes
A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.

Daniel Keyes
Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together. This kind of picture is a lie. Things are forced to fit because the writer or the director or somebody wanted something in that didn't belong. And it doesn't feel right

Daniel Keyes
I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.

Daniel Keyes