Ethel Waters Quotes

I never posed as a saint. I would have slept with a man for nothing if I liked him well enough.

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

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

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

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

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

I don't care to dress up except when it is necessary or good for my business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 am an isolationist.

Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.

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.

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

What broke Mom's heart was realizing that her children knew nothing and cared nothing about the better side of life.

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

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.

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.

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

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 never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.

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

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

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.

I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.

Today I blame only certain agents for my long eclipse as a public entertainer.

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.

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

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

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

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

I could always open shows, perform through the middle, and close shows.

My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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