Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees anyone whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light.

dont want to make god angrey.

bad if I find out that everybody isnt nice like I think. She said for a person who God gave so little to you did more than a lot of people with brains they never even used.

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

If they gave him enough time—if they didn’t rush him or push him too fast—he would get it. But nobody has time.

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.

I’m a person. I was somebody before I went under the surgeon’s knife. And I have to love someone.

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

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

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

Anyone can feel intelligent beside a moron.”

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.

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.”

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.

As I suspected all along, he was not really gone. Nothing in our minds is ever really gone. The operation had covered him over with a veneer of education and culture, but emotionally he was there—watching and waiting.

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.

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.

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.

The depressing thing is that so many of the ideas on which our psychologists base their beliefs about human intelligence, memory, and learning are all wishful thinking.

of helping others like myself, I will be satisfied. Whatever happens to me, I will have lived a thousand normal lives by what I might add to others not yet born. That’s enough.

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.”

We learn what something is not—and that is as important as a positive discovery to the man who is going to pick up from there. At least he knows what not to do.”

“The problem, dear professor, is that you wanted someone who could be made intelligent but still be kept in a cage and displayed when necessary to reap the honors you seek. The hitch is that I’m a person.”

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

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. 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.

She had a knife, and Alice had a knife, and my father had a knife, and Dr. Strauss had a knife. . . .

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

I loved her with more than my body.

My body shuddered with giving, and her body shuddered its acceptance.

As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other’s hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing.

Why am I always looking at life through a window?

call me or Joe or Frank and we will set him strait. We all want you to remember that you got frends here and dont you ever forget it.

It was like I never had a family til I remembird about them and saw them and now I know I had a family and I was a person just like evryone.

Its good to no things and be smart and I wish I new evrything in the hole world.

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