Ethel Waters Quotes
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Though I was excited about the Sojourner Truth play, it was not reassuring to think that my entire future might depend on the success of that one show.
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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 know the most terrible thing that can happen to a woman. That is the gang-up. Men put you to sleep with their drops and one man after another goes in and takes you.
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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 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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We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
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I am an isolationist.
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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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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'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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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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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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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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I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
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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 never posed as a saint. I would have slept with a man for nothing if I liked him well enough.
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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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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 dressed plain, but my partners were always spending more money on clothes than I could afford.
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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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What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.
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Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.