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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
Trying
Kind
Teenager
People
Grown
Inspirational
Back
Wanted
Matter
Hard

More quotes by Ethel Waters

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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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I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
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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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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 show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
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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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Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
Ethel Waters
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There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.
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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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Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
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Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
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I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
Ethel Waters
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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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I never posed as a saint. I would have slept with a man for nothing if I liked him well enough.
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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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 a probing mind and an elephant memory.
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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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.
Ethel Waters
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All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
Ethel Waters