Quotes from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“That's the thing about human life--there is no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“...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.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“There are so many doors to open. I am impatient to begin."

--Charlie Gordan”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“Why am I always looking at life through a window?”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“There are a lot of people who will give money or materials, but very few who will give time and affection.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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?”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“Just leave me alone. I'm not myself. I'm falling apart, and I don't want you here.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“I'm living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed. Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up into my pores during the day, and at night—in the moments before I pass off into sleep—ideas explode into my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem. Incredible that anything could happen to take away this bubbling energy, the zest that fills everything I do. It's as if all the knowledge I've soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“But I've learned that 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: intelligent and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn...Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love...Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

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

--Charlie Gordan”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“Although we know the end of the maze holds death (and it is something I have not always known--not long ago the adolescent in me thought death could happen only to other people), I see now that the path I choose through that 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.”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

“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, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon

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“And because I found it in my youth, the bar was that much more sacred, its image clouded by that special reverence children accord those places where they feel safe. Others might feel this way about a classroom or playground, a theater or church, a laboratory or library or stadium. Even a home. But none of these places claimed me. We exalt what is at hand. Had I grown up beside a river or an ocean, some natural avenue of self-discovery and escape, I might have mythologized it. Instead I grew up 142 steps from a glorious old American tavern, and that has made all the difference.”
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“Huh, another queen,” Puck mused, an evil grin crossing his face. “Maybe we should drop in and introduce ourselves, ice-boy. Do the whole, hey, we were just in the neighborhood, and we were just wondering if you had any plans to take over the Nevernever. Have a fruit basket.”
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“Children write essays in school about the unhappy, tragic, doomed life of Anna Karenina. But was Anna really unhappy? She chose passion and she paid for her passion—that's happiness! She was a free, proud human being. But what if during peacetime a lot of greatcoats and peaked caps burst into the house where you were born and live, and ordered the whole family to leave house and town in twenty-four hours, with only what your feeble hands can carry?... You open your doors, call in the passers-by from the streets and ask them to buy things from you, or to throw you a few pennies to buy bread with... With ribbon in her hair, your daughter sits down at the piano for the last time to play Mozart. But she bursts into tears and runs away. So why should I read Anna Karenina again? Maybe it's enough—what I've experienced. Where can people read about us? Us? Only in a hundred years?
"They deported all members of the nobility from Leningrad. (There were a hundred thousand of them, I suppose. But did we pay much attention? What kind of wretched little ex-nobles were they, the ones who remained? Old people and children, the helpless ones.) We knew this, we looked on and did nothing. You see, we weren't the victims."
"You bought their pianos?"
"We may even have bought their pianos. Yes, of course we bought them."
Oleg could now see that this woman was not yet even fifty. Yet anyone walking past her would have said she was an old woman. A lock of smooth old woman's hair, quite incurable, hung down from under her white head-scarf.

"But when you were deported, what was it for? What was the charge?"
"Why bother to think up a charge? 'Socially harmful' or 'socially dangerous element'—S.D.E.', they called it. Special decrees, just marked by letters of the alphabet. So it was quite easy. No trial necessary."
"And what about your husband? Who was he?"
"Nobody. He played the flute in the Leningrad Philharmonic. He liked to talk when he'd had a few drinks."
“…We knew one family with grown-up children, a son and a daughter, both Komsomol (Communist youth members). Suddenly the whole family was put down for deportation to Siberia. The children rushed to the Komsomol district office. 'Protect us!' they said. 'Certainly we'll protect you,' they were told. 'Just write on this piece of paper: As from today's date I ask not to be considered the son, or the daughter, of such-and-such parents. I renounce them as socially harmful elements and I promise in the future to have nothing whatever to do with them and to maintain no communication with them.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quote from Cancer Ward

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