Top 100 Daniel Keyes Quotes
#1. Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts the most.
Daniel Keyes
#2. Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.
Daniel Keyes
#3. Three blind mice ... three blind mice, See how they run, See how they runt
They all run after the farmer's wife, She cut oft their tails with a carving
knife, Did you ever see such a sight in your life, As three ... blind ... mice?
Daniel Keyes
#4. I put Algernon's body in a cheese box and buried him in the backyard. I cried.
Daniel Keyes
#5. I see now that when Norma flowered in our garden I became a weed, allowed to exist only where I would not be seen, in corners and dark places.
Daniel Keyes
#6. Then when you want free association, you could stretch your patient out the way the barber does to lather up his customer, and when the fifty minutes are up, you could tilt the chair forward again and hand him a mirror so he can see what he looks like on the outside after you've shaved his ego.
Daniel Keyes
#7. there's one thing you've all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn." I
Daniel Keyes
#8. Pushing too hard will only make things freeze up. 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?
Daniel Keyes
#9. Its easy to have frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go.
Daniel Keyes
#10. Downhill. Thoughts of suicide to stop it all now while I am still in control and aware of the world around me. But then I think of Charlie waiting at the window. His life is not mine to throw away. I've just burrowed it for a while, and now I'm being asked to return it.
Daniel Keyes
#11. I love the fact that 'Flowers for Algernon' is doing its part to get people reading.
Daniel Keyes
#12. To control one's own destiny takes a mastermind. To execute the plans takes a fool.
Daniel Keyes
#13. 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.
Daniel Keyes
#14. I've learned that intelligence alone doesn't mean a damn thing. It only leads to violence and pain.
Daniel Keyes
#15. A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.
Daniel Keyes
#16. The more intelligent you become the more problems you'll have, Charlie.
Daniel Keyes
#17. Because I want to see. I've got to know what's going to happen while I'm still enough in control to be able to do something about it.
Daniel Keyes
#18. People think it's funny when a dumb person can't do things the same way they can.
Daniel Keyes
#19. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy. And now that I've found it, how can I give it up? Life and work are the most wonderful things a man can have.
Daniel Keyes
#20. How can I make him understand that he did not create me?
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.
Daniel Keyes
#21. I am just as far away from Alice with an I.Q. of 185 as I was when I had an I.Q. of 70. And this time we both know it.
Daniel Keyes
#22. I dint know they had majers in collidge. I thot it was onley in the army. Anyway
Daniel Keyes
#23. I wanted to be in love with her. I wanted to overcome my emotional and sexual fears, to marry, have children, settle down.
Daniel Keyes
#25. It doesn't matter what he thinks of himself. Sure he's egotistic, so what? It takes that kind of ego to make a man attempt a thing like this. I've seen enough of men like him to know that mixed in with that pompousness and self-assertion is a goddamned good measure of uncertainty and fear.
Daniel Keyes
#26. I am in love with what I am doing, because the answer to this problem is right here in my mind, and soon - very soon - it will burst into consciousness.
Daniel Keyes
#27. Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you.
Daniel Keyes
#28. It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy - about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind.
Daniel Keyes
#29. I hated her as I had never hated anyone before - with her easy answers and maternal fussing. I wanted to slap her face, to make her crawl, and then to hold her in my arms and kiss her.
Daniel Keyes
#30. 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.
Daniel Keyes
#31. what's wrong with a person wanting to be more intelligent, to acquire knowledge, and understand himself and the world?" "If you'd read your Bible, Charlie, you'd know that it's not meant for man to know more than was given to him to know by the Lord
Daniel Keyes
#32. Language is sometimes a barrier instead of a pathway.
Daniel Keyes
#33. Light and unfeeling. Drifting and expanding through time and space. And then, as I know I am about to pierce the crust of existence, like a flying fish leaping out of the sea, I feel the pull from below.
Daniel Keyes
#34. Each day I learn more and more about myself, and the memories that began to ripples now wash over in high breaking waves ...
Daniel Keyes
#35. I just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me.
Daniel Keyes
#36. Shut up!Leave him alone! He cant understand. He cant help what he is ... but for God's sake, have some respect! He's a human being!
Daniel Keyes
#37. Algernon is a pleasant companion. At mealtimes, he takes his place at the small gateleg table. He likes pretzels, and today he took a sip of beer while we watched the ballgame on TV. I think he rooted for the Yankees.
Daniel Keyes
#38. There are a lot of people who will give money or materials, but very few who will give time and affection.
Daniel Keyes
#39. Alice knows everything about me, and accepts the fact that we can be together for only a short while. She has agreed to go away when I tell her to go. It's painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime.
Daniel Keyes
#40. I realize now that my feeling for Alice had been moving backward against the current of my learning, from worship, to love, to fondness, to a feeling of gratitude and responsibility.
Daniel Keyes
#41. I may soon be coming to Warren, tos pend the rest of my life with the others ... waiting.
Daniel Keyes
#42. Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men.
Charlie Gordan
Daniel Keyes
#43. 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.
Daniel Keyes
#44. Just leave me alone. I'm not myself. I'm falling apart, and I don't want you here.
Daniel Keyes
#45. All the barriers were gone. I had unwound the string she had given me, and found my way out of the labyrinth to where she was waiting. I loved her with more than my body.
Daniel Keyes
#46. My studies are going well. The university library is my second home now. They've had to get me a private room because it takes me only a second to absorb the printed page, and curious students invariably gather around me as I flip through my books.
Daniel Keyes
#47. Who's to say death is better than your darkness?
Daniel Keyes
#48. And he has the teacher's fear of being surpassed by the student, the master's dread of having the disciple discredit his work. (Not that I am in any real sense Nemur's student or disciple as Burt is.) I guess Nemur's fear of being revealed as a man walking on stilts among giants is understandable.
Daniel Keyes
#49. So this is how a person can come to despise himself-knowing he's doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.
Daniel Keyes
#50. I was her bestist pupil in the Beckman School for retarted adults and I tryed the hardist becus I reely wantd to lern I wantid it more even then pepul who are smarter even then me.
Daniel Keyes
#51. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other - child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway towards the goal-box of solitary death.
Daniel Keyes
#52. It was as if I had been looking at the whole thing clearly on the blackboard of my mind, but when I turned to read it, part of it had been erased and the rest didn't make sense.
Daniel Keyes
#53. I may not have all the time I thought I had...
Daniel Keyes
#54. I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.
Daniel Keyes
#55. It's not love-but she's important to me. I find myself listening for her
footsteps down the hallway whenever she's been out.
Daniel Keyes
#56. I am afraid. Not of live, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if it had never been.
Daniel Keyes
#57. What's right? Ironic that all my intelligence doesn't help me solve a problem like this.
Daniel Keyes
#58. It must be rather dull taking up someone else's work rather than something you've conceived and created yourself.
Daniel Keyes
#59. 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.
Daniel Keyes
#60. ARTIFICIALLY-INDUCED INTELLIGENCE DETERIORATES AT A RATE OF TIME DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THE QUANTITY OF THE INCREASE.
Daniel Keyes
#61. Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up to my pores during the day, and at night - in the moments before I pass off into sleep - ideas explode into my head like fireworks.
Daniel Keyes
#62. Solitude gives me a chance to read and think, and now that the memories are coming through again - to rediscover my past, to find out who and what I really am. If anything should go wrong, I'll have at least that.
Daniel Keyes
#63. Unlike Charlie, I was incapable of making friends or thinking about other people and their problems. I was interested in myself, and myself only. Fr one long moment in that mirror I had seen myself through Charlie's eyes - looked down at myself and saw what I had really become. And I was ashamed.
Daniel Keyes
#64. So even if I'm getting intelligent and learning a lot of new things, he thinks I'm still a boy about women. It's confusing, but I'm going to find out all about my life.
Daniel Keyes
#65. Intelligence and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn.
Daniel Keyes
#66. Holy smoke I reely pulled a Charlie Gordon that time.
Daniel Keyes
#67. Strauss again brought up my need to speak and wrtie simply and directly so that people will understand me. He reminds me that language is sometimes a barrier instead of a pathway. Ironic to find myself on the other side of the intellectual fence.
Daniel Keyes
#68. If your smart you can have lots of frends to talk to and you never get lonley by yourself all the time.
Daniel Keyes
#69. Who's to say that death is better than your darkness?
Daniel Keyes
#70. Ordinary people, she said, can see only a little bit. They can't change much or go any higher than they are, but you're a genius. You'll keep going up and up, and see more and more. And each step will reveal worlds you never even knew existed.
Daniel Keyes
#71. Before, they had laughed at me, despising me for my ignorance and dullness; now, they hated me for my knowledge and understanding. Why? What in God's name did they want of me?
Daniel Keyes
#72. The last time we were here," I said, "I told you I liked you. I should have trusted myself to say I love you.
Daniel Keyes
#73. . . . the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes . . .' October
Daniel Keyes
#74. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less - filling
Daniel Keyes
#75. 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.
Daniel Keyes
#76. 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.
Daniel Keyes
#77. I pray God it is the answer I want, but if not I will accept any answer at all and try to be grateful for what I had.
Daniel Keyes
#78. Who's to say that my light is better than your darkness? Who's to say death is better than your darkness? Who am I to say?
Daniel Keyes
#79. What an incredible thing! How much less they had than other human beings. Mentally retarded, deaf, mute - and still eagerly sanding benches.
Daniel Keyes
#80. I thought: 'My education is driving a wedge between me and the people I love.' And then I wondered: 'What would happen if it were possible to increase a person's intelligence?'
Daniel Keyes
#81. ... experimental failure, the disproving of a theory, was as important to the advancement of learning as a success would be.
Daniel Keyes
#82. How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibilty, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes - how such people think nothing of abusing a man with low intelligence.
Daniel Keyes
#83. I dont no what sience is but they all keep saying it so maybe its someting that helps you have good luk.
Daniel Keyes
#84. And now - Plato's words mock me in the shadows on the ledge behind the flames: ' ... the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes.
Daniel Keyes
#85. Why am I always looking at life through a window?
Daniel Keyes
#86. The current of my mind carried me swiftly into the open sea.
Daniel Keyes
#87. They would always find excuses to slip away, afraid to reveal the narrowness of their knowledge.
Daniel Keyes
#88. That's the thing about human life
there is no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.
Daniel Keyes
#89. Results are often negative. 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.
Daniel Keyes
#90. 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 any one who tries to steal my time.
Daniel Keyes
#91. Door's open!" she shouted. She was in her underwear, lying on the floor, arms outstretched and legs up against the couch. She tilted her head back and looked at me upside down. "Charlie, darling! Why are you standing on your head?
Daniel Keyes
#92. My anger was an exciting feeling, and I didn't give it up easily. I was ready to fight.
Daniel Keyes
#93. P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.
Daniel Keyes
#94. Algernon is so smart he has to solve a problem with a lock that changes every time he goes in to eat so he has to lern something new to get his food. That made me sad because if he coulnt lern he wouldnt be able to eat and he would be hungry.
Daniel Keyes
#95. By shutting out the real world we can live peacefully in ours. We know that a world without pain is a world without feeling ... But a world without feeling is a world without pain.
Daniel Keyes
#96. My confused feeling for her had been holding me back, and I had to clung to her out of my fear of being forced out on my own, and cut adrift.
Daniel Keyes
#97. When he admitted this to me, I found myself almost annoyed. It was as if he'd hidden this part of himself in order to deceive me, pretending
as do many people I've discovered
to be what he is not. No one I've ever known is what he appears to be on the surface.
Daniel Keyes
#98. 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.
Daniel Keyes
#99. There are so many doors to open. I am impatient to begin.
Charlie Gordan
Daniel Keyes
#100. The more she talked that way, the worse I felt. She highlighted my awkwardness, my lack of knowledge about the right things to say and do. I was a blundering adolescent in her eyes, and she was trying to let me down easy.
Daniel Keyes
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
