Alex Haley Quotes

I can't feel Irish to save my soul, but it's a fact.

I later heard somewhere, or read, that Malcolm X telephoned an apology to the reporter. But this was the kind of evidence which caused many close observers of the Malcolm X phenomenon to declare in absolute seriousness that he was the only Negro in America who could either start a race riot-or stop one. When I once quoted this to him, tacitly inviting his comment, he told me tartly, I don't know if I could start one. I don't know if I'd want to stop one.

I get interviewed a lot, and I found myself listening to what the interviewer is asking me, I'm analyzing what I'm being asked more than my response.

Find the Good and Praise it" by Alex Haley

I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.

He thought that it was impossible for a massa to perceive that being owned by anyone could never be enjoyable.

We all suffer. If a man's wise, he learns from it.

Most of the things that are asked of me as a representative black person, would suggest never are we equal Americans.

Racism is taught in our society ... it is not automatic.
It is learned behavior toward persons with
dissimilar physical characteristics.

The way to succeed is never quit. Thats it. But really be humble about it.

He wondered if she also knew how strange and sad he found it to hear her talking--as so many others did--about 'usn's',' and acting as if se owned the plantation she lived on instead of the other way around.

There was a great deal of inbreeding between the Indians and the slaves. Genetically speaking, black people are some part black, some part European.

I travel a lot. It used to be, when I would go to any country, I could guarantee that the first question would establish my name, and the fact that I've written Roots, and the third question, at least no later than the fourth question would not be a question, so much as a statement, something like, "We understand that in America white people do such and such bad things to black people."

You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life.

I am really quite proud of most of the people I " know who have "made it," who do things to help people.

Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.

Nightly boiling and then cooling a broth of freshly pounded fudano leaves in which she soaked her feat -and the pale palms of her hands- to an inky blackness. When Kunta asked his mother she told him to run along. So he asked his father, who told him, The more blackness a woman has the more beautiful she is.

Is this how you repay my goodness
with badness?" cried the boy. "Of course," said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth. "That is the way of the world.

Raw, naked truth exchanged between the black man and the white man is what a whole lot more of is needed in this country - to clear the air of the racial mirages, cliches, and lies that this country's very atmosphere has been filled with for four hundred years.

I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history and culture of other people.

It was the first time the name had ever been spoken as this child's name, for Omoro's people felt that each human being should be the first to know who he was.

My parents were teachers and they went out of their way to see to it that I had books. We grew up in a home that was full of books. And so I learned to read. I loved to read.

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

When you clench your fist, no one can put anything in your hand.

Your attitude is everything. Believe in yourself and trust your material. To be a successful writer, write every single day where you feel like it or not. Never, never give up, and the world will reward you beyond your wildest dreams.

It is the way of the world that goodness is often repaid by badness.

I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn't have gotten me out of my books with a wedge ... Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.

It's always intrigued me that amidst the group called slaves there were individuals who were extremely able, who were extremely colorful, who were powerful personalities, who by no means fit the usual images of slaves. They were people who, through their personalities and abilities, were very respected in the community where they lived by both black and white.

Brown people wouldn't speak to someone who was black.

Indeed optimists rather than defeatists have produced the results for which serious genealogical research is best known.

It's an hour during the week where you can just slow down.

If you need to know history, the real story of those before you, then you should go to the library and read newspaper clippings of someone like Muhammad Ali every day, then it might giver you some understanding of the man.

Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.

If you go back to before mankind came out of the cave, there was hatred.

My fondest hope is that 'Roots' may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.

I don't mind shaking hands with a human being, are you one?

In the bush, trust no one you don't know.

Unless we learn from history, we are destined to repeat it. This is no longer merely an academic exercise, but may contain our worlds fate and our destiny.

I tell younger writers that indeed it is devastating to be rejected. You feel like the bottom dropped out of your world.

The first time he had taken the massa to one of these "high-falutin' to-dos," as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion - but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led.

The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle.

I believed he had no human weaknesses or faults, and that, therefore, he could make no mistakes and that he could do no wrong. There on a Holy World hilltop, I realized how very dangerous it is for people to hold any human being in such esteem, especially to consider anyone some sort of "divinely guided" and "protected" person.

History is written by winners.

Through this flesh, which is us, we are you, and you are us!

He meant you no harm?" said Omoro.
"He acted very friendly," said the old man, "but the cat always eats the mouse it plats with.

So Dad has joined the others up there. I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners.

You can never enslave somebody who knows who he is.

I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn't make me love the less successful one any less.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.