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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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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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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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My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.
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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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You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.
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I am somebody cause God don't make no junk
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Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
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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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All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
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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.
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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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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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When I first went on the stage I was 17 and under the legal age for performers.
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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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Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
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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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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 could always open shows, perform through the middle, and close shows.
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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.