Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

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

dint eat no appels or do nothing sinful. And now Im skared. Mabey I shoudnt of let them oparate on my branes like she said if its agenst god. I dont want to make god angrey.

beet Algernon. I dint even know I beet him until Burt Selden told me.

‘The more intelligent you become the more problems you’ll have, Charlie. Your intellectual growth is going to outstrip your emotional

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.

What’s right? Ironic that all my intelligence doesn’t help me solve a problem like

Strange how when I’m in the college cafeteria and hear the students arguing about history or politics or religion, it all seems so childish.

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. He doesn’t realize that I was a person before I came here.

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

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 born with low intelligence. It infuriated

Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men. A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.

I noticed that she kept to my left so that the blotch on her face was hidden. She took me through the dormitory, the laundry, the supply

you’ve all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.’

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.

you. Nobody does. 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? . . . ‘But I’ll tell you something

It’s foolish and sentimental, but late last night I buried him in the back yard. I wept as I put a bunch of wild flowers on the grave.

but still you’ve got your life to live and we don’t happen to belong on the same level. I passed your floor on the way up, and now I’m passing it on the way down, and I don’t think I’ll be taking this elevator again. So let’s just say good-bye here and now.’

Before I could say anything, she kissed me. I waited, as she sat beside me on the couch, resting her head against my chest, but the panic didn’t come. Alice was a woman, but perhaps now Charlie would understand that she wasn’t his mother or his sister.

normal. She’s humoring me. And when I saw that box I remembered the boy at Warren and the lousy lamp he made and the way we were all humoring him, pretending he had done something wonderful when he hadn’t.