Alex Haley

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Every death is like the burning of a library.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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