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

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
Shy
Plenty
Hurt
Reason

More quotes by Ethel Waters

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You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.
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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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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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There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.
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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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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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Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
Ethel Waters
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Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
Ethel Waters
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I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
Ethel Waters
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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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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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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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Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to 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.
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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I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
Ethel Waters
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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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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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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
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All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
Ethel Waters