Ethel Waters
Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.Collection: Good
We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.Collection: Brainy
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.Collection: Teen
Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.Collection: Mom
Elia Kazan understood my problems. He was able to bring out the very best in me. He gave me credit for my intelligence.Collection: Intelligence
You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of a family. Just do your job right and your kids will love you.Collection: Mom
Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.
When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.
Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.
All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
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.
Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.
I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
I never was a child.
Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.
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.
I am an isolationist.
Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.
We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.
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.
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.
No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.
New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.
My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
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.
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.
I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.
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 cannot help feeling I would have been happier with a husband and chidren of my own.
All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
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 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 am somebody cause God don't make no junkCollection: Junk
Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.Collection: People
Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.Collection: Fire
We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.Collection: Missing
You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.Collection: Mother
There had been lots of crises in my life. And there was plenty of spunk and battle cry still left in me.Collection: Battle
I learned early in life not to judge others. We outcasts are very happy and content to leave that job to our social superiors.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Book
I'm not afraid to die. I'm looking forward to it. I know the Lord has His arms wrapped around this big sparrow.Collection: Sparrows
Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.Collection: Writing