Top 180 Daniel Keyes Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The most important thing had always been what other people thought – appearances before herself or her family. And righteous about it.”

— Daniel Keyes

102. “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

103. “I find no pleasure in discussing ideas any more on such an elementary level.”

— Daniel Keyes

104. “Cuando le dije que no sabia pensar me dijo intentalo. Mientras tenia las bendas en los ojos intente pensar. No paso nada. No se en que pensar. Alomejor si se lo pregunto me dira como tengo que pensar aora que tengo que volberme listo. Que piensan las personas que son listas. Seguro que cosas marabillosas. Me gustaria saber cosas marabillosas ya.”

— Daniel Keyes

105. “People resent being shown that they don’t approach the complexities of the problem – they don’t know what exists beyond the surface ripples.”

— Daniel Keyes

106. “Seeing myself in the front mirror looking into the back mirror, as he held it for me, it tilted for an instant into the one angle that produced the illusion of depth; endless corridors of myself... looking at myself... looking at myself... looking... Which one? Who was I?”

— Daniel Keyes

107. “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

108. “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.”

— Daniel Keyes

109. “Her voice, hoarse, was an unmistakable echo down the corridors of memory.”

— Daniel Keyes

110. “Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less – filling.”

— Daniel Keyes

111. “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

112. “And I waited, as a blasphemer waits for lightning. I looked away.”

— Daniel Keyes

113. “Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up into my pores during the day, and at night – in the moments before I pass off into sleep – ideas explode into my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem.”

— Daniel Keyes

114. “I spend most of my free time at the library now, reading and soaking up what I can from books. I’m not concentrating on anything in particular, just reading a lot of fiction now – Dostoevski, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner – everything I can get my hands on – feeding a hunger that can’t be satisfied.”

— Daniel Keyes

115. “I wanted to get up and show everyone what a fool he was, to shout at him: I’m a human being, a person – with parents and memories and a history – and I was before you wheeled me into that operating room!”

— Daniel Keyes

116. “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

117. “Are you content? If so, you can afford to ignore the condemnation of the crowd.”

— Daniel Keyes

118. “Charlie, you amaze me. In some ways you’re so advanced, and yet when it comes to making a decision, you’re still a child. I can’t decide for you, Charlie. 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

119. “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

120. “I am an expanding universe swimming upward in a silent sea.”

— Daniel Keyes

121. “The feeling of cold grayness was everywhere around me-a sense of resignation. There had been no talk of rehabilitation, of cure, of someday sending these people out into the world again. No one had spoken of hope. The feeling was of living death-or worse, of never having been fully alive and knowing. Souls withered from the beginning, and doomed to stare into the time and space of every day.”

— Daniel Keyes

122. “He laughed and then he got up from his chair and went to the window. “The more intelligent you become the more problems you’ll have, Charlie. Your intellectual growth is going to outstrip your emotional growth. And I think you’ll find that as you progress, there will be many things you’ll want to talk to me about. I just want you to remember that this is the place for you to come when you need help.”

— Daniel Keyes

123. “Exceptional refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I’ve been exceptional.”

— Daniel Keyes

124. “As the boy’s vacant eyes moved across the crowd of amused onlookers, he slowly mirrored their smiles and finally broke into an uncertain grin at the joke which he did not understand. I felt sick inside as I looked at his dull, vacuous smile – the wide, bright eyes of a child, uncertain but eager to please, and I realized what I had recognized in him.”

— Daniel Keyes

125. “And they talked about politics and art and God. I never before heard anyone say that there might not be a God. That frightened me, because for the first time I began to think about what God means. 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.”

— Daniel Keyes

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

— Daniel Keyes

127. “Its getting chilly out but I still put flowers on Algernons grave.”

— Daniel Keyes

128. “I’ve got to work out the rule. If I can find that out, and if it adds even one jot of information to whatever else has been discovered about mental retardation and the possibility of helping others like myself, I will be satisfied. Whatever happens to me, I will have lived a thousand normal lives by what I might add to others not yet born.”

— Daniel Keyes

129. “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

130. “I wasn’t his son. That was another Charlie. Intelligence and knowledge had changed me, and he would resent me – as the others from the bakery resented me – because my growth diminished him.”

— Daniel Keyes

131. “Finished Robinson Crusoe. I want to find out more about what happens to him but Miss Kinnian says thats all there is. WHY.”

— Daniel Keyes

132. “I was wandering around like a lost soul, and then I saw that I was lost.”

— Daniel Keyes

133. “They all think I’m killing myself at this pace, but what they don’t understand is that I’m living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed.”

— Daniel Keyes

134. “L’intelligenza e l’educazione che non siano temperate dall’affetto umano non valgono nulla.”

— Daniel Keyes

135. “The humble, self-effacing Charlie you were all talking about a while ago is just waiting patiently. I’ll admit I’m like him in a number of ways, but humility and self-effacement are not among them. I’ve learned how little they get a person in this world.”

— Daniel Keyes

136. “I still hear her. But perhaps I had been released. Maybe the fear and nausea was no longer a sea to drown in, but only a pool of water reflecting the past alongside the now. Was I free?”

— Daniel Keyes

137. “What’s right? Ironic that all my intelligence doesn’t help me solve a problem like this.”

— Daniel Keyes

138. “As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other’s hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing.”

— Daniel Keyes

139. “I’m not your friend. I’m your enemy. I’m not going to give up my intelligence without a struggle. I can’t go back down into that cave. There’s no place for me to go now, Charlie. So you’ve got to stay away. Stay inside my unconscious where you belong, and stop following me around. I’m not going to give up – no matter what they all think. No matter how lonely it is. I’m going to keep what they’ve given me and do great things for the world and for other people like you.”

— Daniel Keyes

140. “And so it went. Most of them felt the way Joe and Frank and Gimpy did. It had been all right as long they could laugh at me and appear clever at my expense, but now they were feeling inferior to the moron. I began to see that by my astonishing growth I had made them shrink and emphasized their inadequacies. I had betrayed them, and they hated me for it.”

— Daniel Keyes

141. “As long as the writer, or any artist for that matter, keeps his mouth shut, there can be argument and discussion and various interpretations and meanings. But once the writer explains or analyzes, he trivializes his own work.”

— Daniel Keyes

142. “You can’t have everything you want in one woman. One more argument for polygamy.”

— Daniel Keyes

143. “She brings me things to eat and she fixes my bed and she says I was a very brave man to let them do things to my hed. 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.”

— Daniel Keyes

144. “I put Algernon’s body into a small metal container and took him home with me. I wasn’t going to let them dump him into the incinerator. It’s foolish and sentimental, but late last night I buried him in the back yard. I wept as I put a bunch of wild flowers on the grave.”

— Daniel Keyes

145. “I dedicated my first piano concerto to Fay. 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

146. “Why is it so important for me to say to her: “Mom, look at me. I’m not retarded any more. I’m normal. Better than normal. I’m a genius?”

— Daniel Keyes

147. “I dint know they had majers in collidge. I thot it was onley in the army. Anyway.”

— Daniel Keyes

148. “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

149. “This is beauty, love, and truth, all rolled into one. This is joy. And now that I’ve found it, how can I give up? Life and work are the most wonderful things a man can have.”

— Daniel Keyes

150. “Qualquer um pode se sentir inteligente ao lado de um imbecil.”

— Daniel Keyes