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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

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Alex Haley
Age: 70 †
Born: 1921
Born: August 11
Died: 1992
Died: February 10
Biographer
Genealogist
Historian
Journalist
Military Personnel
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Ithica
New York
Alexander Murray Palmer Haley
Alexander M. P. Haley
Spring
Early
Days
Four
Born
Coast
Village
Africa
West

More quotes by Alex Haley

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When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.
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If you go back to before mankind came out of the cave, there was hatred.
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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.
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When you clench your fist, no one can put anything in your hand.
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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
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I tell younger writers that indeed it is devastating to be rejected. You feel like the bottom dropped out of your world.
Alex Haley
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It's an hour during the week where you can just slow down.
Alex Haley
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
Alex Haley
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Brown people wouldn't speak to someone who was black.
Alex Haley
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Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.
Alex Haley
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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
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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
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You can never enslave somebody who knows who he is.
Alex Haley
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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.
Alex Haley
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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
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I know that statistically, it has been proven that there is a tremendous amount of black on black crime within the inner cities.
Alex Haley
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The way to succeed is never quit. Thats it. But really be humble about it.
Alex Haley