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All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.

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
Life
Epidemic
Epidemics
Epic
Two
Things
Men

More quotes by 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 want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
Ethel Waters
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Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
Ethel Waters
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Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.
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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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There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
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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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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We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
Ethel Waters
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I found that a couple of bottles of beer would give me a lift, but the third bottle would sober me up.
Ethel Waters
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You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.
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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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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There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
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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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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What broke Mom's heart was realizing that her children knew nothing and cared nothing about the better side of life.
Ethel Waters
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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.
Ethel Waters
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My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
Ethel Waters
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Today I blame only certain agents for my long eclipse as a public entertainer.
Ethel Waters