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It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.
Ethel Waters -
We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
Ethel Waters
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All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
Ethel Waters -
I have always been psychic. The walls of any room I walk into talk to me.
Ethel Waters -
Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.
Ethel Waters -
Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
Ethel Waters -
My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
Ethel Waters -
After years in white theaters I dreaded working in colored houses. The noise, the stomping, whistling, and cheering that hadn't annoyed me when I was young was now something I dreaded.
Ethel Waters
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There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
Ethel Waters -
There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.
Ethel Waters -
Today I blame only certain agents for my long eclipse as a public entertainer.
Ethel Waters -
I learned early in life not to judge others. We outcasts are very happy and content to leave that job to our social superiors.
Ethel Waters -
Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
Ethel Waters -
There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
Ethel Waters
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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.
Ethel Waters -
Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
Ethel Waters -
Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.
Ethel Waters -
I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
Ethel Waters -
In her whole life Mom never earned more than five or six dollars a week. Being without a husband, it was hard for her to find any place at all for us to live.
Ethel Waters -
The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.
Ethel Waters
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I wondered what I would do if I didn't have my God to turn to and be able to read the Book He had divinely inspired.
Ethel Waters -
I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
Ethel Waters -
Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
Ethel Waters -
I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
Ethel Waters