Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

and I have two minds. Theres the SUBCONSCIOUS and the CONSCIOUS (thats how you spell it) and one dont tell the other what its doing. They dont even talk to each other. Thats why I dream.

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

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.

Three blind mice . . . three blind mice, See how they run! See how they run! They all run after the farmer’s wife, She cut off their tails with a carving knife, Did you ever see such a sight in your life, As three . . . blind . . . mice?

“It was evil when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. It was evil when they saw they was naked, and learned about lust and shame. And they was driven out of Paradise and the gates was closed to them. If not for that none of us would have to grow old and be sick and die.”

He reminds me that language is sometimes a barrier instead of a pathway.

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.

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.

She was excited by the idea of having something dedicated to her, but I don’t think she really liked it. Just goes to show that you can’t have everything you want in one woman. One more argument for polygamy.

She’s interested in only three things that I can see: dancing, painting, and sex. And the only thing we really have in common is sex.

She was explaining to Alice that as far as she was concerned there was nothing more valuable to the human body than sunbathing, and that nudist colonies were the answer to the world’s moral problems.

There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem.

“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.”

you’ve developed from a likeable, retarded young man into an arrogant, self-centered, antisocial bastard.”

intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”

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.

Three blind mice . . . three blind mice, See how they run! See how they run! They all run after the farmer’s wife, She cut off their tails with a carving knife, Did you ever see such a sight in your life, As three . . . blind . . . mice?

Does he fear seeing God? Or seeing nothing?

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

It’s a strange sensation to pick up a book you read and enjoyed just a few months ago and discover you don’t remember it.

Here i goes again.

I don’t pretend to understand the mystery of love, but this time it was more than sex, more than using a woman’s body. It was being lifted off the earth, outside fear and torment, being part of something greater than myself.

This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other’s arms, giving and taking.