Flowers For Algernon: The must-read literary science fiction masterpiece (S.F. MASTERWORKS Book 6)

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.

There was no way to stop the sands of knowledge from slipping through the hourglass of my mind.

She was sharp, all right. She didn’t want Hyram Harvey to forget that her husband had the credit coming. I couldn’t resist tossing it back at her. ‘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.’

Yet, Gimpy is a co-worker. Three children. What will he do if Donner fires him? He might not be able to get another job – especially with his club foot. Is that my worry? What’s right? Ironic that all my intelligence doesn’t help me solve a problem like this.

How different they seem to be now. And how foolish I was ever to have thought that professors were intellectual giants. They’re people – and afraid the rest of the world will find out. And Alice is a person too – a woman, not a goddess – and I’m taking her to the concert tomorrow night.

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?

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. It infuriated me to remember that not too long ago I – like this boy – had foolishly played the clown.

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.

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.