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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
Trying
Express
Lifetime
Joy
Known
Suffering

More quotes by Ethel Waters

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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 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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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 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 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.
Ethel Waters
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All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
Ethel Waters
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I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
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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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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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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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I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
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Today I blame only certain agents for my long eclipse as a public entertainer.
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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 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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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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Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
Ethel Waters
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All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
Ethel Waters