Ethel Waters famous quotes

We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
-- Ethel Waters

#Happiness #Inspiring #Success

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

#Phones #News #May

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

#Epic #Men #Epidemics

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

#Flower #Smell #Earth

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

#Inspirational #Teenager #People

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

#Sweat #Able #Brows

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

#Stars #Ideas #Accepted

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

#White #Gloves #Spades

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

#Moving #Beer #Glasses

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

#Mom #Regret #Business

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

#Fog #Used #Treatment

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

#Mom #Drinking #Childhood

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

#Mom #Husband #Hard Life

I could depend a lot on my shaking, though I never shimmied vulgarly and only to express myself.
-- Ethel Waters

#Black History #Black #Shaking

Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
-- Ethel Waters

#People #Praise #Criticize

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

#Success #Thinking #Play

I am an isolationist.
-- Ethel Waters

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

#Fire #Authenticity #Burned

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

#Jobs #Judging #Outsiders

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

#Missing #Quitting #Judgment

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

#Cheer #Fear #Years

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

#Ohio #Mohawks #Columbus

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

#Mom #Kitchen #Tin

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

#Hurt #Shy #Reason

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

#Yesterday #Joy #Looks

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

#People #Pay #Privilege

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

#Want #Affection #Tenderness

There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
-- Ethel Waters

#Hypocrisy #Kitchen #Hell

All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
-- Ethel Waters

#People #Wealthy

Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.
-- Ethel Waters

#Salary #Asking #Want

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

#Thinking #Yellow #Differences

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.
-- Ethel Waters

#Play #Acting #Technique

I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
-- Ethel Waters

#Outsiders

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

#My Family #Whole Family #Instruments

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

#Race #Faults #Virtue

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

#New York #Cities #Philadelphia

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

#Mother #Evangelism #Release

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

#Business #Undertaker #Shows

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

#Emotional #People #Singing

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

#Wall #Psychics #Rooms