The novel Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes is about a man named Charlie Gordon with an extremely low IQ.
Scientists have discovered how to make a mouse named Algernon intelligent with experimental surgery.
Charlie Gordon was the first human to undergo the experimental surgery.
The procedure appears to be a success as Charlie’s intelligence surpasses that of the doctors and researchers.
But can Charlie’s emotional intelligence keep up with his mental intelligence?
When Algernon appears to regress, what will happen to Charlie?
Flowers for Algernon Quotes With Page Numbers
“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, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), March 5, Page 4
“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, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), mar 6, Page 9
“I hate that mouse”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), March 15, Page 18
“April 6—Today, I learned, the comma, this is, a, comma (,) a period, with, a tail, Miss Kinnian, says its, importent, because, it makes writing, better, she said, somebody, could lose, a lot, of money, if a comma, isnt in, the right, place, I got, some money, that I, saved from, my job, and what, the foundation, pays me, but not, much and, I dont see how, a comma, keeps, you from, losing it,
But, she says, everybody, uses commas, so Ill, use them, too,,,,
April 7—I used the comma wrong. Its punctuation…Miss Kinnian says a period is punctuation too, and there are lots of other marks to learn.
She said; You, got. to-mix?them!up: She showd? me” how, to mix! them; up, and now! I can. mix (up all? kinds of punctuation— in, my. writing! There” are lots, of rules; to learn? but. Im’ get’ting them in my head:
One thing? I, like: about, Dear Miss Kinnian: (thats, the way? it goes; in a business letter (if I ever go! into business?) is that, she: always; gives me’ a reason” when—I ask. She”s a gen’ius! I wish? I could be smart-like-her;
Punctuation, is? Fun!”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), April 6 and April 7, Pages 37, 38
“Punctuation, is? Fun!”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), April 7, Page 39
“The more intelligent you become the more problems you’ll have, Charlie.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, April 14, Page 47
“My anger was an exciting feeling, and I didn’t want to give it up easily. I was ready to fight.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), April 18, Page 57
“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, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), April 27, Page 71
“Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, May 1, Page 77
“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, Flowers for Algernon, May 1, Page 77
“I’m like a man who’s been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), May 3, Page 82
“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, Flowers for Algernon, May 10, Page 91
“The last time we were here,” I said, “I told you I liked you. I should have trusted myself to say I love you.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), May 10, Page 92
“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, Flowers for Algernon, May 25, Page 108
“language is sometimes a barrier instead of a pathway.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, June 5, Page 114
“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, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), June 10, Page 145
“I’m not close to him.” He looked at me defiantly. “But he’s put his whole life into this. He’s no Freud or Jung or Pavlov or Watson, but he’s doing something important and I respect his dedication – maybe even more because he’s just an ordinary man trying to do a great man’s work, while the great men are all busy making bombs.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, June 11, Page 151
“I’m “exceptional”- a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of “gifted” and “deprived” (which used to mean “bright” and “retarded”) and as soon as “exceptional” begins to mean anything to anyone they’ll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression as long as it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. “Exceptional” refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I’ve been exceptional.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, June 11, Page 153
“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, Flowers for Algernon, June 11, Page 153
“I may not have all the time I thought I had…”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, June 13, Page 165
“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, Flowers for Algernon, July 15, Page 168
“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, Flowers for Algernon, June 24, Page 199
“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, Flowers for Algernon, June 24, Page 199
“Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, June 24, Page 199
“A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, June 24, Page 200
“There are so many doors to open. I am impatient to begin.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, June 24, Page 200
“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, Flowers for Algernon, June 25, Page 202
“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, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), July 12, Pages 220
“Although we know the end of the maze holds death (and it is something I have not always known–not long ago the adolescent in me thought death could happen only to other people), 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–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, Flowers for Algernon, July 12, Page 220
“I see now that 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, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), July 12, Pages 220, 221
“There are a lot of people who will give money or materials, but very few who will give time and affection.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, July 14, Page 230
“I’m living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed. 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. Incredible that anything could happen to take away this bubbling energy, the zest that fills everything I do. 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, Flowers for Algernon, July 31, Page 240
“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, Flowers for Algernon, August 11, Page 243
“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 Keys, Flowers for Algernon, August 11, Page 247
“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. I present it to you as a hypothesis: 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.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, August 11, Page 249
“But 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: intelligent and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn…Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love…Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), August 11, Page 249
“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, Flowers for Algernon, August 11, Page 252
“What has happened to me? Why am I so alone in the world?”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, August 11, Page 253
“The only question now is: How much can I hang on to?”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, September 2, Page 257
“I put Algernon’s body in a cheese box and buried him in the backyard. I cried.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), September 15, Page 258
“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), October 4, Page 284
“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.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), October 4, Page 285
“I passed your floor on the way up, and now I’m passing it on the way down, and I don’t think I’ll be taking this elevator again.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), October 5, Page 288
“I can’t afford to spend my time with anyone – there’s only enough left for myself”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), October 11, Page 292
“All the barriers were gone. I had unwound the string she had given me, and found my way out of the labyrinth to where she was waiting. I loved her with more than my body.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), October 11, Page 293
“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, Flowers for Algernon, October 11, Page 294
“Alice knows everything about me, and accepts the fact that we can be together for only a short while. She has 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, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), October 11, Pages 294, 295
“Just leave me alone. I’m not myself. I’m falling apart, and I don’t want you here.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), October 21, Page 300
“Its easy to have frends if you let pepul laff at you.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), Nov 21, Page 311
“P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.”
~Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, (Charlie Gordon), Nov 21, Page 311
Flowers for Algernon Summary
Flowers for Algernon is a story about Charlie Gordon, a man with a learning disability whose life is changed forever when he undergoes an experimental procedure that increases his intelligence.
As Charlie’s intelligence grows, he discovers that he is part of a larger experiment and must grapple with the implications of his newfound knowledge.
As he struggles to come to terms with the changes in his life, Charlie must also confront the reality of what the experiment has done to him.
This book deals with morality, approval, solitude, and comprehension. The narrative culminates with Charlie giving himself up to help others reach their highest potential.
Did you find the quotes from Flowers For Algernon that you need? If not, what is missing?