Daniel Keyes Quotations

My father was in the paper recycling business back before they called it recycling.

I thought: 'My education is driving a wedge between me and the people I love.' And then I wondered: 'What would happen if it were possible to increase a person's intelligence?'

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

Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men." --Charlie Gordan

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.

Why am I always looking at life through a window?

The only question now is: How much can I hang on to?

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.

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.

I may not have all the time I thought I had...

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

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.

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. Charlie, you've got to learn to trust yourself

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?

Life and work are the most wonderful things a man can have.

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.

Im like a man whos been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up.

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.

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

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

How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibilty, 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.

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

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.

Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you.

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 cant be that because I didnt eat any cheese last week.

...Don't feel sorry for me. I'm glad I had a second chance in life like you said to be smart because I learned a lot of things that I never knew were in this world, and I'm grateful I saw it even for a little bit.

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.

There are so many doors to open. I am impatient to begin." --Charlie Gordan

I was her bestist pupil in the Beckman School for retarted adults and I tryed the hardist becus I reely wantd to lern I wantid it more even then pepul who are smarter even then me.

Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.

And now - Plato's words mock me in the shadows on the ledge behind the flames: '...the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes.

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.

Punctuation, is? fun!

The path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. 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.

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.

Thank God for books and music and things I can think about." --Charlie Gordan

Now I understand that 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.

Intelligence and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn.

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

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.

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

People think it's funny when a dumb person can't do things the same way they can.

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

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.

I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.

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

Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything - all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it. Is there time?

I've learned that intelligence alone doesn't mean a damn thing. It only leads to violence and pain.

I love the fact that 'Flowers for Algernon' is doing its part to get people reading.