Quote

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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Ethel Waters
Age: 80 †
Born: 1896
Born: October 31
Died: 1977
Died: September 1
Film Actor
Jazz Musician
Singer
Stage Actor
Vocalist
Chester
Pennsylvania
Didn
Someone
Work
Boosted
Salary
Considered
Asking
Pay
Impossible

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There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
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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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Today I blame only certain agents for my long eclipse as a public entertainer.
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I could always open shows, perform through the middle, and close shows.
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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.
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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 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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There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
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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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Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
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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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The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.
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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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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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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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Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
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All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
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I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
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I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
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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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