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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
Matter
Hard
Trying
Kind
Teenager
People
Grown
Inspirational
Back
Wanted

More quotes by Ethel Waters

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There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
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I dressed plain, but my partners were always spending more money on clothes than I could afford.
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If whites bored me, it was because they bored themselves. They seemed to get little fun out of life and were desperately lonely.
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We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.
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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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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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Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
Ethel Waters
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We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
Ethel Waters
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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.
Ethel Waters
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My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.
Ethel Waters
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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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Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.
Ethel Waters
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There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
Ethel Waters
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There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.
Ethel Waters
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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.
Ethel Waters
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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.
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
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Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
Ethel Waters
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When I act I try to express the suffering or joy I've known during my lifetime.
Ethel Waters
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I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
Ethel Waters