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Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes

Top 10 Best Quotes

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”

“Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.”

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

“Now I understand that 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.”

“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.”

“Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: 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.”

“Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you.”

“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.”

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

“Why am I always looking at life through a window?”

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Book Keywords:

friendship, happiness, death, fear, love, loneliness, charlie, intelligence, music, life, flowers-for-algernon, philosophy, book, inspirational, books, psychology, melancholy

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