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Ethel Waters Quotes


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.

All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.

All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.

Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.

Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.

Elia Kazan understood my problems. He was able to bring out the very best in me. He gave me credit for my intelligence.

I am an isolationist.

I cannot help feeling I would have been happier with a husband and chidren of my own.

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.

I have no acting technique I act instinctively. That's why I can't play any role that isn't based on something in my life.

I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.

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 never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.

I never was a child.

I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.

I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.

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.

I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.

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.

It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.