Alex > Alex's Quotes

“I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. (107)”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibilty, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man with low intelligence.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Why am I always looking at life through a window?”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts the most.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“So this is how a person can come to despise himself-knowing he's doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“How can I make him understand that he did not create me?
He makes the same mistake as the others when they look at a feeble-minded person and laugh because they don't understand there are human feelings involved.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“I’m “exceptional”- a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of “gifted” and “deprived” (which used to mean “bright” and “retarded”) and as soon as “exceptional” begins to mean anything to anyone they’ll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression as long as it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. “Exceptional” refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I’ve been exceptional.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“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.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“One of the things that confuses me is never really knowing when something comes up from my past, whether it really happened that way, or if that was the way it seemed to be at the time, or if I’m inventing it. I’m like a man who’s been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“When he admitted this to me, I found myself almost annoyed. It was as if he'd hidden this part of himself in order to deceive me, pretending-- as do many people I've discovered--to be what he is not. No one I've ever known is what he appears to be on the surface.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Downhill. Thoughts of suicide to stop it all now while I am still in control and aware of the world around me. But then I think of Charlie waiting at the window. His life is not mine to throw away. I've just burrowed it for a while, and now I'm being asked to return it.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Before, they had laughed at me, despising me for my ignorance and dullness; now, they hated me for my knowledge and understanding. Why? What in God's name did they want of me?”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“People think it’s funny when a dumb person can’t do things the same way they can.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“If I didn't understand what was happening at the time, he says, then it doesn't matter. I'm no more to blame than the knife is to blame in a stabbing, or the car in a collision.

"But I'm not an inanimate object," I argued. "I'm a person."

He looked confused for a moment and then laughed. "Of course, Charlie. But I wasn't referring to now. I meant before the operation."

Smug, pompous—I felt like hitting him too. "I was a person before the operation. In case you forgot—"

"Yes, of course, Charlie. Don't misunderstand. But it was different..." And then he remembered that he had to check some charts in the lab.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“The most important thing had always been what other people thought-appearances before herself or her family. And righteous about it. Time and again Matt had insisted that what others thought about you wasn't the only thing in life. But it did no good. Norma had to dress well; the house had to have fine furniture; Charlie had to be kept inside so that other people wouldn't know anything was wrong.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men.
A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“I wanted to know the truth, and yet I was afraid of what I might learn.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“I wanted to get up and show everyone what a fool he was, to shout at him: I'm a human being, a person - with parents and memories and a history - and I was before you wheeled me into that operating room!”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters