Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

She says she woud never let them do things to her branes for all the tea in china. I tolld her it wasnt for tea in china. It was to make me smart.

I dont think its right to make you pass a test to eat. How woud Burt like to have to pass a test every time he wants to eat. I think Ill be frends with Algernon.

People think it’s funny when a dumb person can’t do things the same way they can.

He says it will confuse me and make me think about psychological theories instead of about my own ideas and feelings.

I guess it will take time for them to get used to the changes in me.

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.

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.

You take liberties with other people’s minds. You can’t tell how I feel or what I feel or why I feel.”

The foolish thing was trying to solve the problem all by myself. 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.

How many great problems have gone unsolved because men didn’t know enough, or have enough faith in the creative process and in themselves, to let go for the whole mind to work at it?

But what you did for me—wonderful as it is—doesn’t give you the right to treat me like an experimental animal.

Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis.

I want to understand her, to know what she was like and why she acted the way she did. I mustn’t hate her.

Always working to show the neighbors what a good wife and mother she was. The most important thing had always been what other people thought—appearances before herself or her family.

Its easy to have frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go.