Alex Haley quotes

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

#Inspirational #Family #Meaningful

I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true.
-- Alex Haley

#Thinking #People #Groups

Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.
-- Alex Haley

#Life #Children #Grandmother

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.
-- Alex Haley

#Powerful #Mean #Black And White

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

#Racism #Racist #Our Society

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

#People #Black #Inbreeding

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.
-- Alex Haley

#Heritage #Who We Are #Hunger

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.
-- Alex Haley

#Family #Talking #Earth

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

#Funny #Animal #Turtles

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

#Acceptance #Facts #Life Is

I wasn't going to be one of those people who died wondering what if? I would keep putting my dreams to the test - even though it meant living with uncertainty and fear of failure. This is the shadowland of hope, and anyone with a dream must learn to live there.
-- Alex Haley

#Dream #People #What If

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

#Reality #Deals

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

#Educational #Hands #Fists

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.
-- Alex Haley

#Thinking #People #Culture

In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.
-- Alex Haley

#Writing #Praise

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.
-- Alex Haley

#Writing #Years #Appreciate

Every death is like the burning of a library.
-- Alex Haley

#Inspirational #Library #Burning

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

#Roots #People #My Family

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

#Hustle #World #Remember

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage- to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.
-- Alex Haley

#Loneliness #Adoption #Who We Are

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

#Trust No One

Never completely encircle your enemy. Leave him some escape, for he will fight even more desperately if trapped.
-- Alex Haley

#Fighting #Enemy

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

#Week #Hours #Slow Down

Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.
-- Alex Haley

#Spring #Village #Four

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.
-- Alex Haley

#Library #Today #Debt

Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there's a big difference between being a writer and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. You've got to want to write, I say to them, not want to be a writer. The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.
-- Alex Haley

#Dream #Lonely #Writing

You can never enslave somebody who knows who he is.
-- Alex Haley

You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you. It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps.
-- Alex Haley

#Years #Feelings #Twenties

Find the Good and Praise it" by Alex Haley
-- Alex Haley

#Alex #Praise #Haley

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.
-- Alex Haley

#Book #Reading #Thinking

I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books.
-- Alex Haley

#Book #College #Asking Questions

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.
-- Alex Haley

#Boys #World #Mouths

The way to succeed is never quit. That's it. But really be humble about it. ... You start out lowly and humble and you carefully try to learn an accretion of little things that help you get there.
-- Alex Haley

#Time #Humble #Trying

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

#Humble #Humility #Never Quit

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.
-- Alex Haley

#Men #Roots #Yellow

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.
-- Alex Haley

#Children #Book #Successful

Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.
-- Alex Haley

#Powerful #Tools #Littles

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.
-- Alex Haley

#Real #Men #Understanding

History is written by winners.
-- Alex Haley

#Winner

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.
-- Alex Haley

#Wisdom #Exercise #Fate

That's what happens with writing. Ingredients bubble and cook. Material becomes substance.
-- Alex Haley

#Writing #Substance #Ingredients

Every time an old person dies, it's like a library burning down.
-- Alex Haley

#Library #Burning #Persons