Alex Haley Quotes

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth. We all have it; it's a great equalizer. White people come up to me and tell me that Roots has started them thinking about their own families and where they came from. I think the book has touched a strong, subliminal pulse.

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

Mingo went toward his cabin, but turning at the door, he looked back at George. “Hear me, boy! You thinks you’s sump’n special wid massa, but nothin’ don’t make no difference to mad, scared white folks! Don’t you be no fool an’ slip off nowhere till this blow over, you hear me? I mean don’t!

Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, “Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee.” (Behold — the only thing greater than yourself.)

"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.

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

I read aimlessly, until I learned to read selectively, with a purpose. - Malcom X

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

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

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

"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."

Playboy: Why are you smiling? Thompson: Am I smiling? Yeah, I guess I am…well, it’s fun to lose it sometimes.

The family is our refuge and our springboard; nourished on it, we can advance to new horizons. In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

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.

He came cripping slowly back up the driveway - when an African remembrance flashed into his mind, and near the front of the house he bent down and started peering around. Determining the clearest prints that Kizzy's bare feet had left in the dust, scooping up the double handful containing those footprints, he went rushing toward the cabin: The ancient forefathers said that precious dust kept in some safe place would insure Kizzy's return to where she made the footprints. He burst through the cabin's open door, his eyes sweeping the room and falling upon his gourd on a shelf containing his pebbles. Springing over there, in the instant before opening his cupped hands to drop in the dirt, suddenly he knew the truth: His Kizzy was gone; she would not return. He would never see his Kizzy again. His face contorting, Kunta flung his dust toward the cabin's roof. Tears bursting, from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all his strength, and it shattered against the packed-Earth floor, his 662 pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting wildly in all directions.