Ethel Waters Quotes

I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.

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.

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

We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.

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

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

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.

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.