Alex Haley Quotes

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

You're always being judged. No matter what you do, it's not the right thing. If you didn't become successful, then you'd be pointed at as one of those creatures down their who didn't take advantage of this or that, who didn't climb and rise and so forth.

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

But then, as far as I know, as far as I've studied or heard or picked up, it seems that this type of thing is a curse against mankind.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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