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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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We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
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When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.
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My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
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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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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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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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Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
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My aunts lived on liquor and seldom felt like eating much. I don't know what's wrong about a kid stealing when he's hungry.
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Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
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I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
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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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I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
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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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We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.
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My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.
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I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
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Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
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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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There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.
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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.
Ethel Waters