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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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My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.
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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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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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Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
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There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
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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.
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All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
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My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
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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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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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I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
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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.
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We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
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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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When I act I try to express the suffering or joy I've known during my lifetime.
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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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Today I blame only certain agents for my long eclipse as a public entertainer.
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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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Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
Ethel Waters