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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.

Ethel Waters

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Ethel Waters
Age: 80 †
Born: 1896
Born: October 31
Died: 1977
Died: September 1
Film Actor
Jazz Musician
Singer
Stage Actor
Vocalist
Chester
Pennsylvania
Back
Wanted
Matter
Hard
Trying
Kind
Teenager
People
Grown
Inspirational

More quotes by Ethel Waters

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Today I blame only certain agents for my long eclipse as a public entertainer.
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Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
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Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
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I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
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Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
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What broke Mom's heart was realizing that her children knew nothing and cared nothing about the better side of life.
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We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
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The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.
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I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
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Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
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There had been lots of crises in my life. And there was plenty of spunk and battle cry still left in me.
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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.
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I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
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My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
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I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
Ethel Waters
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Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.
Ethel Waters