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What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.
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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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Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
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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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My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.
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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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You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.
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We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.
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If I wanted pity, I got it because I'm illegitimate. And when I didn't want it I was mean and nasty.
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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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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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I found that a couple of bottles of beer would give me a lift, but the third bottle would sober me up.
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When I first went on the stage I was 17 and under the legal age for performers.
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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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All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
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The big compliment came from the beer drinkers who didn't know me. They wouldn't drink or move when I sang. If they had their glasses in mid-air, the glasses wouldn't come down.
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I am somebody cause God don't make no junk
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Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
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I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
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Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.