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

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

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.

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.

intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.’

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

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.

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.’

Who’s to say that my light is better than your darkness? Who’s to say death is better than your darkness? Who am I to say? . . .

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.