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

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.’

Paradise Lost I could only remember it was about

Why am I always looking at life through a window?

‘I think I’ve changed during these weeks away from the lab,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t see how to do it at first, but tonight, while I was wandering around the city, it came to me. The foolish thing was trying to solve the problem all by myself. But the deeper I get tangled up in this mass of dreams and memories the more I realize that emotional problems

The depressing thing is that so many of the ideas on which our psychologists base their beliefs about human intelligence, memory, and learning are all wishful thinking.

No one had spoken of hope. The feeling was of living death – or worse, of never having been fully alive and knowing. Souls withered from the beginning, and doomed to stare into the time and space of every day.

I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.

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.

What’s right? Ironic that all my intelligence doesn’t help me solve a problem like this.