Top 180 Daniel Keyes Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I’ve got to realize that when they continually admonish me to speak and write simply so that people who read these reports will be able to understand me, they are talking about themselves as well. But still it’s frightening to realize that my fate is in the hands of men who are not the giants I once thought them to be, men who don’t know all the answers.”

— Daniel Keyes

152. “I remember that she was always fluttering like a big, white bird – around my father, and he too heavy and tired to escape her pecking.”

— Daniel Keyes

153. “I danced with too many squares tonight. Let’s melt ’em all down.”

— Daniel Keyes

154. “No wonder that had been easy. It had been only physical. This with Alice was a mystery.”

— Daniel Keyes

155. “Nothing in our minds is ever really gone. The operation had covered him over with a veneer of education and culture, but emotionally he was there – watching and waiting.”

— Daniel Keyes

156. “Before he could say any more or try to stop me, I was out of the lab, and I caught the elevator down and out of Beekman for the last time.”

— Daniel Keyes

157. “He finished shaving me silently, and then brought the sun-tan lamp over to the chair and put cool white pads of cotton soaked in witch hazel over my eyes. There, in the bright red inner darkness I saw what happened the night he took me away from the house for the last time .”

— Daniel Keyes

158. “No one really starts anything new, Mrs. Nemur. Everyone builds on other men’s failures.”

— Daniel Keyes

159. “I want you to understand this mite fale and then nothing woud happen at all. Or it mite even sucseed temperary and leeve you werse off then you are now.”

— Daniel Keyes

160. “Dan, you don’t mean to tell me that you didn’t get in touch with the bookstores in Detroit and tell them about it.” “No,” I said. “I’m kind of shy. And I didn’t think it was my job.” “Dan, you shouldn’t hide your light under a bushel.”

— Daniel Keyes

161. “Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men.”

— Daniel Keyes

162. “This day was good for me. I’ve got to stop this childish worrying about myself – my past and my future. Let me give something of myself to others. I’ve got to use my knowledge and skills to work in the field of increasing human intelligence.”

— Daniel Keyes

163. “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

164. “It doesn’t mean – she shrugged. It just is – like a poem.”

— Daniel Keyes

165. “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

166. “Boy if I get smart wont he be serprised.”

— Daniel Keyes

167. “I let it lay there and its torn white tongues were laughing because I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I’ve got to try to hold onto some of the things I’ve learned. Please, God, don’t take it all away.”

— Daniel Keyes

168. “Even in my dullness I knew I was inferior. Other people had something I lacked – something denied me. In my mental blindness, I had believed it was somehow connected with the ability to read and write, and I was sure that if I could get those skills I would have intelligence too. Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men. A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.”

— Daniel Keyes

169. “You see that bottle?” I told him I had wondered about it when we came into his office. “Well, how many people do you know who are prepared to take a grown man into his arms and let him nurse with the bottle? And take the chance of having the patient urinate or defecate all over him? You look surprised. You can’t understand it, can you, from way up there in your research ivory tower? What do you know about being shut out from every human experience as our patients have been?”

— Daniel Keyes

170. “She said for a person who God gave so little to you did more than a lot of people with brains they never even used.”

— Daniel Keyes

171. “This was the way he loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other’s arms, giving and taking. 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 toward the goal-box of solitary death.”

— Daniel Keyes

172. “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

173. “The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”

— Daniel Keyes

174. “It is impossible to tell what proportion is memory and what exists here and now – so that a strange compound is formed of memory and reality; past and present; response to stimuli stored in my brain centers, an response to stimuli in this room. It’s as if all the things I’ve learned have fused into a crystal universe spinning before me so that I can see all the facets of it reflected in gorgeous bursts of light...”

— Daniel Keyes

175. “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

176. “I began to see that by my astonishing growth I had made them shrink and emphasized their inadequacies.”

— Daniel Keyes

177. “If I could reach out into the past of my memories, I would make her see how much she was hurting me.”

— Daniel Keyes

178. “Ma io so adesso che voi tutti avete trascurato una cosa: l’intelligenza e l’educazione che non siano temperate dall’affetto umano non valgono nulla.”

— Daniel Keyes

179. “Seeing Charlie huddled beneath the covers I wish I could give him comfort, explain to him that he has done nothing wrong, that it is beyond him to change his mother’s attitude back to what it was before his sister came. There on the bed, Charlie did not understand what they were saying, but now it hurts. If I could reach out into the past of my memories, I would make her see how much she was hurting me.”

— Daniel Keyes

180. “There was no way to stop the sands of knowledge from slipping through the hourglass of my mind.”

— Daniel Keyes

181. “I’ve got to guard against the natural tendency to look down on them now that I have surpassed them.”

— Daniel Keyes

182. “Dostoevski, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner.”

— Daniel Keyes

183. “If I coud I woud sit down and reed all the time.”

— Daniel Keyes

184. “I know I should have written some progress reports before this so they will know whats happening to me. But writing is harder. I have to look up even simple words in the dictionary now and it makes me angry with myself.”

— Daniel Keyes

185. “On the sidewalk, a discarded refrigerator with its face ripped off, and on the curb an old mattress with wire intestines hanging out of its belly.”

— Daniel Keyes