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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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Ethel Waters
Age: 80 †
Born: 1896
Born: October 31
Died: 1977
Died: September 1
Film Actor
Jazz Musician
Singer
Stage Actor
Vocalist
Chester
Pennsylvania
Joy
Known
Suffering
Trying
Express
Lifetime

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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There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
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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 was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
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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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We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.
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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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Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
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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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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 had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
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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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I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
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Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
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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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There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
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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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I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
Ethel Waters