Flowers for Algernon

Highlights

• It is soft and warm and he feels the confusion of relief and fear. It is his, but she will take it away from him as she always does. She will take it away and keep it for herself.
• I hated her as I had never hated anyone before – with her easy answers and maternal fussing. I wanted to slap her face, to make her crawl, and then to hold her in my arms and kiss her.
• I’m a person. I was somebody before I went under the surgeon’s knife. And I have to love someone.
• What’s right? Ironic that all my intelligence doesn’t help me solve a problem like this.
• Feeling my hand stir, she gripped it tighter as if she had to finish her story before she could let me go. It was important to her, and I sat quietly as one sits before a bird that feeds from your palm.
• 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.
• 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.
• On the way out, Charlie sees on the kitchen table the long carving knife she cuts roasts with, and he senses vaguely that she wanted to hurt him. She wanted to take something away from him, and give it to Norma.
• A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.
• 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.
• The gray murk lifted from my mind, and through it the light pierced into my brain (how strange that light should blind!), and my body was absorbed back into a great sea of space, washed under in a strange baptism. My body shuddered with giving, and her body shuddered its acceptance.
• Alice knows everything about me now, 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.
• The only bad thing about having Alice here with me is that now I feel I should fight this thing. I want to stop time, freeze myself at this level and never let go of her.
• When she went to the bedroom and cried I felt bad about it and I told her it was all my fault I don’t deserve someone as good as her. Why can’t I control myself just enough to keep on loving her? Just enough.
• please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.