226 Quotes by Daniel Keyes

I love the fact that 'Flowers for Algernon' is doing its part to get people reading.

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.

Just leave me alone. I’m not myself. I’m falling apart, and I don’t want you here.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Light and unfeeling. Drifting and expanding through time and space. And then, as I know I am about to pierce the crust of existence, like a flying fish leaping out of the sea, I feel the pull from below.