Quote

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

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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
Never
Week
Life
Five
Place
Find
Earned
Live
Six
Without
Mom
Whole
Dollars
Hard
Husband

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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 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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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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We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
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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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There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.
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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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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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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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Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
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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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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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The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.
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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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I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
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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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Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
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Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
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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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