Top 180 Daniel Keyes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Just leave me alone. I’m not myself. I’m falling apart, and I don’t want you here.”

— Daniel Keyes

2. “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.”

— Daniel Keyes

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

— Daniel Keyes

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

— Daniel Keyes

5. “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

6. “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.”

— Daniel Keyes

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

— Daniel Keyes

8. “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

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

— Daniel Keyes

10. “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

11. “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. Charlie, you’ve got to learn to trust yourself.”

— Daniel Keyes

12. “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

13. “The path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being – one of many ways – and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.”

— Daniel Keyes

14. “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. Is there time?”

— Daniel Keyes

15. “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

16. “Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.”

— Daniel Keyes

17. “I can’t afford to spend my time with anyone – there’s only enough left for myself.”

— Daniel Keyes

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

— Daniel Keyes

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

— 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. “There are a lot of people who will give money or materials, but very few who will give time and affection.”

— Daniel Keyes

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Daniel Keyes

25. “Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together. This kind of picture is a lie. Things are forced to fit because the writer or the director or somebody wanted something in that didn’t belong. And it doesn’t feel right.”

— Daniel Keyes

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

— Daniel Keyes

27. “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

28. “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

29. “The more intelligent you become the more problems you’ll have, Charlie.”

— Daniel Keyes

30. “Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed.”

— Daniel Keyes

31. “I put Algernon’s body in a cheese box and buried him in the backyard. I cried.”

— Daniel Keyes

32. “Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love.”

— Daniel Keyes

33. “The ice had broken between us and the gap was widening as the current of my mind carried me swiftly into the open sea.”

— Daniel Keyes

34. “Holy smoke I reely pulled a Charlie Gordon that time.”

— Daniel Keyes

35. “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. “When I was retarded I had lots of.”

— Daniel Keyes

36. “To control one’s own destiny takes a mastermind. To execute the plans takes a fool.”

— Daniel Keyes

37. “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.”

— Daniel Keyes

38. “Punctuation, is? fun!”

— Daniel Keyes

39. “My mind is a blank. At this point my feelings are more important than anything else.”

— Daniel Keyes

40. “I want to stop time, freeze myself at this level and never let go of her.”

— Daniel Keyes

41. “I just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me.”

— Daniel Keyes

42. “But with the freedom came a sadness.”

— Daniel Keyes

43. “She tried to soothe me, to tell me it didn’t matter, that there was no reason to blame myself. But ashamed, and no longer able to control my anguish, I began to sob. There in her arms I cried myself to sleep, and I dreamed of the courtier and the pink-cheeked maiden. But in my dream it was the maiden who held the sword.”

— Daniel Keyes

44. “I see now that the path I choose through that maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being –.”

— Daniel Keyes

45. “There are a lot of people who will give money or materials, but very few who will give time and affection. That’s what I mean.’ His voice grew harsh, and he pointed to an empty baby bottle on the bookshelf across the room.”

— Daniel Keyes

46. “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

47. “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. That’s what I discovered about myself last night. I told myself I was wandering around like a lost soul, and then I saw that I was lost.”

— Daniel Keyes

48. “It’s amazing the way things, apparently disconnected, hang together.”

— Daniel Keyes

49. “Whatever happens to me, I will have lived a thousand normal lives by what I might add to others not yet born.”

— Daniel Keyes

50. “I wish this memory were a photograph so that I could tear it up and throw it back into her face.”

— Daniel Keyes