Ethel Waters quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ethel Waters

Ethel Waters Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Ethel Waters on Wise Famous Quotes.

Elia Kazan understood my problems. He was able to bring out the very best in me. He gave me credit for my intelligence.

I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.

My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.

What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.

When I first went on the stage I was 17 and under the legal age for performers.

I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.

There had been lots of crises in my life. And there was plenty of spunk and battle cry still left in me.

God doesn't make junk

I have always been psychic. The walls of any room I walk into talk to me.

Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.

We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.

You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of a family. Just do your job right and your kids will love you.

Today I blame only certain agents for my long eclipse as a public entertainer.

Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.

All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.

New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.

I could always open shows, perform through the middle, and close shows.

I wanted to be with the kind of people I'd grown up with, but you can't go back to them and be one of them again, no matter how hard you try.

Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.

It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.

Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.

What broke Mom's heart was realizing that her children knew nothing and cared nothing about the better side of life.

All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.

I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.

I have no acting technique I act instinctively. That's why I can't play any role that isn't based on something in my life.

I don't care to dress up except when it is necessary or good for my business.

I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.

Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.

There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.

Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.

We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.

I could depend a lot on my shaking, though I never shimmied vulgarly and only to express myself.

I am an isolationist.

I never posed as a saint. I would have slept with a man for nothing if I liked him well enough.

Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.

I learned early in life not to judge others. We outcasts are very happy and content to leave that job to our social superiors.

If I wanted pity, I got it because I'm illegitimate. And when I didn't want it I was mean and nasty.

I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.

My aunts lived on liquor and seldom felt like eating much. I don't know what's wrong about a kid stealing when he's hungry.

I cannot help feeling I would have been happier with a husband and chidren of my own.

Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.

I dressed plain, but my partners were always spending more money on clothes than I could afford.

The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.

When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.

If whites bored me, it was because they bored themselves. They seemed to get little fun out of life and were desperately lonely.

We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.

We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.

Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.

My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.

When I act I try to express the suffering or joy I've known during my lifetime.

Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.

I'm not afraid to die. I'm looking forward to it. I know the Lord has His arms wrapped around this big sparrow.

I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.

Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.

Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.

There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.

No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.

Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.

There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.

I am somebody cause God don't make no junk

I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.

I never was a child.

I found that a couple of bottles of beer would give me a lift, but the third bottle would sober me up.