Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

She wanted me to make love to her body while she kept her mind on higher things.

Before, they had laughed at me, despising me for my ignorance and dullness; now, they hated me for my knowledge and understanding.

It's not love—but she's important to me. I find myself listening for her footsteps down the hallway whenever she's been out.

We had a little time together before we got out of touch.
We had things to talk about, and things to do to­gether.
It didn't last very long but it was something.

I feel sick. Not like for a doctor, but inside my chest it feels empty, like getting punched and a heartburn at the same time.

I was on a down escalator now. If I stood still I’d go all the way to the bottom, but if I started to run up maybe I could at least stay in the same place. The important thing was to keep moving upward no matter what happened.

Don't trim the super-ego too close.

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

A simple idea. Trust myself.

We shook hands, and yet, strangely, it was much closer and more intimate than an embrace would have been.

"Why don't you look at me? Are you pretending I don't exist?"
"No, Charlie," she whispered. "I'm pretending I don't exist.

Who's to say that my light is better than your darkness?

I'm a person. And I have to love someone.

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

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.
When I was retarded I had lots of friends.
Now I have no one.
Oh, I know lots of people.
Lots and lots of people.
But I don't have any real friends.
Not like I used to have in the bakery.
Not a friend in the world who means anything to me, and no one I mean anything to.

How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence.