Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

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

One of the things that confuses me is never really knowing when something comes up from my past, whether it really happened that way, or if that was the way it seemed to be at the time, or if I’m inventing it. I’m like a man who’s been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up. Everything is strangely slow-motion and blurred.

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

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

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

Ive got to get hold of myself. I keep saying over and over that Ive got to do something but then I forget or maybe its just easier not to do what I say Im going to do.

P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.