Quotes from Ethel Waters

Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.

There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.

I know the most terrible thing that can happen to a woman. That is the gang-up. Men put you to sleep with their drops and one man after another goes in and takes you.

I never posed as a saint. I would have slept with a man for nothing if I liked him well enough.

We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.

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.

What broke Mom's heart was realizing that her children knew nothing and cared nothing about the better side of life.

You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.

Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.

You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of a family. Just do your job right and your kids will love you.

Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.

I am somebody cause God don't make no junk

I wondered what I would do if I didn't have my God to turn to and be able to read the Book He had divinely inspired.

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

Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.

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.

When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.

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.

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

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

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 that one show.

We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.

I learned early in life not to judge others. We outcasts are very happy and content to leave that job to our social superiors.

The big compliment came from the beer drinkers who didn't know me. They wouldn't drink or move when I sang. If they had their glasses in mid-air, the glasses wouldn't come down.