Ethel Waters Quotes
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Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
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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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There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
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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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What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.
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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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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.
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Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.
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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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My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.
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Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.
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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 have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
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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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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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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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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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We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
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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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The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.
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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.
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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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Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
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It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.
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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 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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Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
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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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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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You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.
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