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.

How does a person go about learning how to act toward another person? How does a man learn how to behave toward a woman?

The answer can’t be found in books—or be solved by bringing it to other people. Not unless you want to remain a child all your life. You’ve got to find the answer inside you—feel the right thing to do.

“You know? You’re sure?” She turned and glared at me on the front steps of her apartment building. “Oh, how insufferable you’ve become. How do you know what I feel? You take liberties with other people’s minds. You can’t tell how I feel or what I feel or why I feel.”

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.

She didn’t give a damn about anything. Why couldn’t I be that way?

It’s not love—but she’s important to me.

Just goes to show that you can’t have everything you want in one woman. One more argument for polygamy.

Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less—filling

I was afraid it would come to this, but I have no patience with her now. I’m jealous of every moment away from the work—impatient with anyone who tries to steal my time.

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.

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