Words matter. These are the best Ethel Waters Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have reason to be shy. I’ve been hurt plenty.
No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.
When you dominate other people’s emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.
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.
Elia Kazan understood my problems. He was able to bring out the very best in me. He gave me credit for my intelligence.
Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.
Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
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.
There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
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.
Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.
Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.
All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.
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.
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 want affection and tenderness desperately, but there’s something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
I’ve never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
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 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.
