Quotes By Ethel Waters

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

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.

We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.

Elia Kazan understood my problems. He was able to bring out the very best in me. He gave me credit for my intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

I never was a child.

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

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.

I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.

I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.