Ethel Waters Quotes

Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.

Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.

We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.

We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.

I am somebody cause God don't make no junk

Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.

Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.

Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.

There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.

All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.

Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.

You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.

Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.

Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.

When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.

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.

Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.

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.

I'm not afraid to die. I'm looking forward to it. I know the Lord has His arms wrapped around this big sparrow.

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.

My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.

When I act I try to express the suffering or joy I've known during my lifetime.

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.

The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.

I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.

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.

It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.

I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.

Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.

I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.

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.

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.

I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.

I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.

I dressed plain, but my partners were always spending more money on clothes than I could afford.

New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.

There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.

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.

I found that a couple of bottles of beer would give me a lift, but the third bottle would sober me up.

We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.

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.

There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.

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.

I learned early in life not to judge others. We outcasts are very happy and content to leave that job to our social superiors.

I have always been psychic. The walls of any room I walk into talk to me.

I am an isolationist.

Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.

We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.

If I wanted pity, I got it because I'm illegitimate. And when I didn't want it I was mean and nasty.

What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.