Quotes from book

Flowers for Algernon

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

“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.”

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

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

“So this is how a person can come to despise himself-knowing he's doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.”

“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.”

“And now - Plato's words mock me in the shadows on the ledge behind the flames: '… the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes.”

“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.”

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

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

“So many of the ideas on which our psychologists base their beliefs about human intelligence, memory, and learning are all wishful thinking.”

“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.”

“The meaning of my total existence involves knowing the possibilities of my future as well as my past, where I'm going as well as where I've been.”

“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.”

“I've got to grow up. For me it means everything…”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“You don't know what it's like to have something happening inside you, that you can't see and can't control, and know it's all slipping through your fingers.”