Top 180 Daniel Keyes Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Is life worth living in the jaws of society’s trash can for misfit minds? What can I possibly achieve or contribute to mankind in this steel and concrete box with a damn loud laughing wall that moves? Just give up?”

— Daniel Keyes

52. “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

53. “When you mature intellectually we may not be able to communicate. When you mature emotionally you may not even want me.”

— Daniel Keyes

54. “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

55. “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

56. “I was on a down escalator now. If I stood still I’d go all the way to the bottom, but if I started to run up maybe I could at least stay in the same place. The important thing was to keep moving upward no matter what happened.”

— Daniel Keyes

57. “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

58. “Life and work are the most wonderful things a man can have.”

— Daniel Keyes

59. “Tell you what I don’t like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist... it’s the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes – like coffins. The only way I can get rid of the boxes is to take a few drinks. Then all the lines get wavy and wiggly, and I feel a lot better about the whole world. When things are all straight and lined up this way I get morbid.”

— Daniel Keyes

60. “She had 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

61. “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

62. “It doesn’t mean,′ she shrugged. ‘It just is.”

— Daniel Keyes

63. “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

64. “You can’t put up a building on a site until you destroy the old one, and the old Charlie can’t be destroyed.”

— Daniel Keyes

65. “What an incredible thing! How much less they had than other human beings. Mentally retarded, deaf, mute – and still eagerly sanding benches.”

— Daniel Keyes

66. “There is no question about it now. I’m in love.”

— Daniel Keyes

67. “The only question now is: How much can I hang on to?”

— Daniel Keyes

68. “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

69. “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

70. “Who’s to say my light is better than your darkness?”

— Daniel Keyes

71. “That’s the most important thing. If I keep reading, maybe I can hold my own.”

— Daniel Keyes

72. “I started out the evening with every intention of being pleasant and making friends. But these days I have trouble getting through to people. I don’t know if it’s me or them, but any attempt at conversation usually fades away in a minute or two, and the barriers go up. Is it because they are afraid of me? Or is it that deep down they don’t care and I feel the same about them?”

— Daniel Keyes

73. “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

74. “My anger was an exciting feeling, and I didn’t give it up easily. I was ready to fight.”

— Daniel Keyes

75. “If your smart you can have lots of frends to talk to and you never get lonley by yourself all the time.”

— Daniel Keyes

76. “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

77. “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

78. “Dr Strauss said I had something that was very good. He said I had a good motor-vation. I never ever knew I had that. I felt proud when he said that not every body with an eye-q of 68 had that thing. I don’t know what it is or where I got it but he said Algernon had it too. Algernons motor-vation is the cheese they put in his box. But it cant be that because I didnt eat any cheese last week.”

— Daniel Keyes

79. “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

80. “I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been. And as I start through the opening, I feel the pressure around me, propelling me in violent wavelike motions toward the mouth of the cave.”

— Daniel Keyes

81. “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

82. “What has happened to me? Why am I so alone in the world?”

— Daniel Keyes

83. “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

84. “I hate that mouse.”

— Daniel Keyes

85. “I’ve learned that intelligence alone doesn’t mean a damned thing. Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge, have all become great idols. But I know now there’s one thing you’ve all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”

— Daniel Keyes

86. “Me, a nothingness zombie in a nothingness box in a nothingness hell.”

— Daniel Keyes

87. “Souls withered from the beginning, and doomed to stare into the time and space of every day.”

— Daniel Keyes

88. “I may not have all the time I thought I had...”

— Daniel Keyes

89. “No one can ever know in advance if a project is going to result in something useful. 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. “The world around me and my past seem far away and distorted, as if time and space were taffy being stretched and looped and twisted out of shape.”

— Daniel Keyes

91. “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

92. “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

93. “There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem.”

— Daniel Keyes

94. “I wanted to know the truth, and yet I was afraid of what I might learn.”

— Daniel Keyes

95. “Nothing in our minds is ever really gone.”

— Daniel Keyes

96. “It’s as if all the knowledge I’ve soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy.”

— Daniel Keyes

97. “Time assumes another dimension now – work and absorption in the search for an answer.”

— Daniel Keyes

98. “It’s confusing, but I’m going to find out all about my life.”

— Daniel Keyes

99. “They would always find excuses to slip away, afraid to reveal the narrowness of their knowledge.”

— Daniel Keyes

100. “It must be rather dull taking up someone else’s work rather than something you’ve conceived and created yourself.”

— Daniel Keyes