1.
Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
Ethel Waters
2.
Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.
Ethel Waters
3.
We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
Ethel Waters
4.
We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.
Ethel Waters
5.
I am somebody cause God don't make no junk
Ethel Waters
6.
Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
Ethel Waters
7.
Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
Ethel Waters
8.
Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.
Ethel Waters
9.
There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
Ethel Waters
10.
All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
Ethel Waters
11.
Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
Ethel Waters
12.
You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.
Ethel Waters
13.
Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
Ethel Waters
14.
Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.
Ethel Waters
15.
When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.
Ethel Waters
16.
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.
Ethel Waters
17.
Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.
Ethel Waters
18.
My aunts lived on liquor and seldom felt like eating much. I don't know what's wrong about a kid stealing when he's hungry.
Ethel Waters
19.
I'm not afraid to die. I'm looking forward to it. I know the Lord has His arms wrapped around this big sparrow.
Ethel Waters
20.
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.
Ethel Waters
21.
My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
Ethel Waters
22.
When I act I try to express the suffering or joy I've known during my lifetime.
Ethel Waters
23.
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.
Ethel Waters
24.
The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.
Ethel Waters
25.
I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
Ethel Waters
26.
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.
Ethel Waters
27.
It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.
Ethel Waters
28.
I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
Ethel Waters
29.
Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
Ethel Waters
30.
I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
Ethel Waters
31.
After years in white theaters I dreaded working in colored houses. The noise, the stomping, whistling, and cheering that hadn't annoyed me when I was young was now something I dreaded.
Ethel Waters
32.
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.
Ethel Waters
33.
I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
Ethel Waters
34.
I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.
Ethel Waters
35.
I dressed plain, but my partners were always spending more money on clothes than I could afford.
Ethel Waters
36.
New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.
Ethel Waters
37.
There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
Ethel Waters
38.
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.
Ethel Waters
39.
I found that a couple of bottles of beer would give me a lift, but the third bottle would sober me up.
Ethel Waters
40.
We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.
Ethel Waters
41.
In her whole life Mom never earned more than five or six dollars a week. Being without a husband, it was hard for her to find any place at all for us to live.
Ethel Waters
42.
There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
Ethel Waters
43.
I wondered what I would do if I didn't have my God to turn to and be able to read the Book He had divinely inspired.
Ethel Waters
44.
I learned early in life not to judge others. We outcasts are very happy and content to leave that job to our social superiors.
Ethel Waters
45.
I have always been psychic. The walls of any room I walk into talk to me.
Ethel Waters
46.
I am an isolationist.
Ethel Waters
47.
Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.
Ethel Waters
48.
We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
Ethel Waters
49.
If I wanted pity, I got it because I'm illegitimate. And when I didn't want it I was mean and nasty.
Ethel Waters
50.
What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.
Ethel Waters
