Ethel Waters Quotes

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

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

I am an isolationist.

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

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

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

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

I am somebody cause God don't make no junk

I cannot help feeling I would have been happier with a husband and chidren of my own.

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

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.

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

We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.

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

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

If whites bored me, it was because they bored themselves. They seemed to get little fun out of life and were desperately lonely.

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.

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

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

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

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

I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.

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

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

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.

When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.

Ignorance, foolishness, and poverty-we owned this by our birth.

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

When I first went on the stage I was 17 and under the legal age for performers.

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.

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

I never was a child.

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

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

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

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

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

We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.

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

God doesn't make junk

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

There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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