Ethel Waters Quotes
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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.
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We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
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All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
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Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.
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I have always been psychic. The walls of any room I walk into talk to me.
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Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
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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.
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There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
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Today I blame only certain agents for my long eclipse as a public entertainer.
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Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
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I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
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There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
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My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
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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.
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I learned early in life not to judge others. We outcasts are very happy and content to leave that job to our social superiors.
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There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.
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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.
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The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.
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Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.
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Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
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I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
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I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
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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.
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I don't care to dress up except when it is necessary or good for my business.