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I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.

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
Always
Never
Belonged
Outsider
Outsiders
Felt

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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.
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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 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.
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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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Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
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There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
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I could always open shows, perform through the middle, and close shows.
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There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
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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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I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
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Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
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My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
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You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.
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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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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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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 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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We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.
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