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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

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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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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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All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
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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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I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
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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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I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
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I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
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I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
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I'm not afraid to die. I'm looking forward to it. I know the Lord has His arms wrapped around this big sparrow.
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I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
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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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Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
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You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.
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There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
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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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The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.
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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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My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
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