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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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Ethel Waters
Age: 80 †
Born: 1896
Born: October 31
Died: 1977
Died: September 1
Film Actor
Jazz Musician
Singer
Stage Actor
Vocalist
Chester
Pennsylvania
Wanted
Lust
Vices
Drinking
Mom
Save
Childhood
Influence
Greatest
Vice

More quotes by 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.
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I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
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There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
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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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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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There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
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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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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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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 had been lots of crises in my life. And there was plenty of spunk and battle cry still left in me.
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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 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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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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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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We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.
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I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
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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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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