Ethel Waters Quotes

42 quotes in 516 categories

• Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.
• I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.
• I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
• Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
• 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…
• I could depend a lot on my shaking, though I never shimmied vulgarly and only to express myself.
• Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
• Though I was excited about the Sojourner Truth play, it was not reassuring to think that my entire future might depend on the success of…
• I am an isolationist.
• 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…
• We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
• I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
• Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.
• It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.
• When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.
• I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
• All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
• There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
• All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
• Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.

Browse Ethel Waters Quotes by Category