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

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

My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
Ethel Waters

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

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

No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.
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.
Ethel Waters

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

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

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

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

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

There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
Ethel Waters

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

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

We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
Ethel Waters

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

We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
Ethel Waters

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

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