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.
- Ethel Waters Quote

All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
- Ethel Waters Quote

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

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

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.
- Ethel Waters Quote

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.
- Ethel Waters Quote

I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.
- Ethel Waters Quote

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

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 Quote

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

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.
- Ethel Waters Quote

Mom never quit on me. My only regret is that she didn't live long enough to share some of the money and comforts my work in show business has brought me.
- Ethel Waters Quote

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 Quote

Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
- Ethel Waters Quote

New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.
- Ethel Waters Quote

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

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.
- Ethel Waters Quote

The first time I sang after my throat operation was one of the tensest times of my life. But my voice proved to have a clearer tone than ever before.
- Ethel Waters Quote

The white audiences thought I was white, my features being what they are, and at every performance I'd have to take off my gloves to prove I was a spade.
- Ethel Waters Quote

There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
- Ethel Waters Quote

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.
- Ethel Waters Quote

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

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

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