Actors were not allowed to dance on the stage on the Sabbath and couldn't wear anything but street clothes while performing.
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 her life my grandmother was puzzled by the four children she had brought into the world. She neither liked nor understood the way they lived.
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.
Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.
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.
Hoofers and singers from all over Harlem wanted to work in our place so they could get their cut of our big kitty.
I am an isolationist.
I cannot help feeling I would have been happier with a husband and chidren of my own.
I could always open shows, perform through the middle, and close shows.
I don't care to dress up except when it is necessary or good for my business.
I dressed plain, but my partners were always spending more money on clothes than I could afford.
I found that a couple of bottles of beer would give me a lift, but the third bottle would sober me up.
I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
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 just ran wild as a little girl. I was always a leader of the street gang. By the time I was 7 I knew all about sex and life in the raw.
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 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 neglect to pray to my God before I step out there.
I never posed as a saint. I would have slept with a man for nothing if I liked him well enough.
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 was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
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.
If I wanted pity, I got it because I'm illegitimate. And when I didn't want it I was mean and nasty.
If whites bored me, it was because they bored themselves. They seemed to get little fun out of life and were desperately lonely.
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.
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.
Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
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.
My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.
My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.
No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.
Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.
Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.
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.
The first Negro woman singer to make a phonograph record was Mamie Smith. My first was made for the Cardinal Company.
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.
The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.
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.
There had been lots of crises in my life. And there was plenty of spunk and battle cry still left in me.
There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.
There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
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.
Today I blame only certain agents for my long eclipse as a public entertainer.
Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.
Twenty-five years is a long time for a girl to live out of a trunk, and after looking over a few houses, I fell in love with one in Southwest Los Angeles.
We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.
We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
We were playing colored theaters, but the white people wanted see me and hear my songs.
What broke Mom's heart was realizing that her children knew nothing and cared nothing about the better side of life.
What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.
When I act I try to express the suffering or joy I've known during my lifetime.
When I first went on the stage I was 17 and under the legal age for performers.
When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.
Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.
Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
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.
Her first dramatic role on Broadway was in the play "Mamba's Daughter."
The songwriter Irving Berlin cast her in his 1933 musical revue "As Thousands Cheer" where she introduced the hit songs "Heat Wave", "Harlem On My Mind", and "Supper Time".
She died at age 80 in the Chatsworth, Ca. home of a young couple that was caring for her.
She headlined at Harlem's famous Cotton Club.
One of the most popular jazz/blues singers of the 1920s, she introduced such classic songs as "Dinah", "Am I Blue," and "Stormy Weather."
The U.S. Postal Service issued an Ethel Waters commemorative stamp in 1994.
She appeared on Broadway for the first time in the musical revue "Africana" (1927).
She posthumously won a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1998.
She was the second African-American actress to ever be nominated for an Academy Award when she appeared in the film "Pinky." (1949)
Ethel Waters appeared on television in 1939 when she made two experimental programs for NBC: Mamba's Daughters and The Ethel Waters Show.
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