Ethel Waters Quotes
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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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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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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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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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I had always loved John Ford's pictures. And I came to love him, too, but I was frightened to death working for him. He used the shock treatment while directing me.
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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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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.
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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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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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When I act I try to express the suffering or joy I've known during my lifetime.
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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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What broke Mom's heart was realizing that her children knew nothing and cared nothing about the better side of life.
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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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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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What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.
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If whites bored me, it was because they bored themselves. They seemed to get little fun out of life and were desperately lonely.
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I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.
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Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
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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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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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Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.