Ethel Waters Quotes
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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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The white audiences thought I was white, my features being what they are, and at every performance I'd have to take off my gloves to prove I was a spade.
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I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
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Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
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I don't care to dress up except when it is necessary or good for my business.
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When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.
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Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.
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I am an isolationist.
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We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
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Mom never quit on me. My only regret is that she didn't live long enough to share some of the money and comforts my work in show business has brought me.
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There had been lots of crises in my life. And there was plenty of spunk and battle cry still left in me.
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We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.
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I'm not afraid to die. I'm looking forward to it. I know the Lord has His arms wrapped around this big sparrow.
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I never posed as a saint. I would have slept with a man for nothing if I liked him well enough.
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New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.
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I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
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Twenty-five years is a long time for a girl to live out of a trunk, and after looking over a few houses, I fell in love with one in Southwest Los Angeles.
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My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.
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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.
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I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
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Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.
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Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.
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Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
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I dressed plain, but my partners were always spending more money on clothes than I could afford.