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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
Childhood
Influence
Greatest
Vice
Wanted
Lust
Vices
Drinking
Mom
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More quotes by Ethel Waters

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I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
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You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.
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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'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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There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
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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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Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
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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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My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
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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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When I act I try to express the suffering or joy I've known during my lifetime.
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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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There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.
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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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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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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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Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
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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.
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.
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I dressed plain, but my partners were always spending more money on clothes than I could afford.
Ethel Waters