Quotes from Daniel Keyes

It was as if I had been looking at the whole thing clearly on the blackboard of my mind, but when I turned to read it, part of it had been erased and the rest didn't make sense.

I will never know. Whatever the truth is, I must not hate Rose

Each day I learn more and more about myself, and the memories that began as ripples now wash over me in high-breaking waves . . .

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.

I may soon be coming to Warren, tos pend the rest of my life with the others...waiting.

Time assumes another dimension now - work and absorption in the search for an answer.

Unlike Charlie, I was incapable of making friends or thinking about other people and their problems. I was interested in myself, and myself only. Fr one long moment in that mirror I had seen myself through Charlie's eyes - looked down at myself and saw what I had really become. And I was ashamed.

Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently.

She had agreed to go away when i tell her to go. It's painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime.

It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy—about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind.

Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less—filling

To control one's own destiny takes a mastermind. To execute the plans takes a fool.

Souls withered from the beginning, and doomed to stare into the time and space of every day.

The more intelligent you become the more problems you'll have, Charlie. Your intellectual growth is going to outstrip your emotional growth.

It's paradoxical that an ordinary man like Nemur presumes to devote himself to making other people geniuses. He would like to be thought of as the discoverer of new laws of learning—the Einstein of psychology. And he has the teacher's fear of being surpassed by the student, the master's dread of having the disciple discredit his work.

That's the most important thing. If I keep reading, maybe I can hold my own.

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.

I find no pleasure in discussing ideas any more on such an elementary level.

And he has the teacher's fear of being surpassed by the student, the master's dread of having the disciple discredit his work. (Not that I am in any real sense Nemur's student or disciple as Burt is.) I guess Nemur's fear of being revealed as a man walking on stilts among giants is understandable.

They all think I'm killing myself at this pace, but what they don't understand is that I'm living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed. Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up into my pores during the day, and at night—in the moments before I pass off into sleep—ideas explode into my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem.

Strauss shook his head. The point I've been trying to make is that this money is intended for research. No one can ever know in advance if a project is going to result in something useful. Results are often negative. We learn what something is not—and that is as important as a positive discovery to the man who is going to pick up from there. At least he knows what not to do.

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

Tell you what I don't like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist . . . it's the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes—like coffins.

The most important thing had always been what other people thought - appearances before herself or her family. And righteous about it.