70 Ethel Waters Quotes On Joy, Positivity, Emotions, Time Etc.
I am somebody cause God don't make no junk
God doesn't make junk
We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
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.
I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.
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 was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
I never posed as a saint. I would have slept with a man for nothing if I liked him well enough.
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.
I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
I have no acting technique I act instinctively. That's why I can't play any role that isn't based on something in my life.
My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
I don't care to dress up except when it is necessary or good for my business.
I could always open shows, perform through the middle, and close shows.
I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.
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.
Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
If whites bored me, it was because they bored themselves. They seemed to get little fun out of life and were desperately lonely.
All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.
When I first went on the stage I was 17 and under the legal age for performers.
I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
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.
What broke Mom's heart was realizing that her children knew nothing and cared nothing about the better side of life.
We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
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.
