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

I never was a child.
Ethel Waters

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

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.
Ethel Waters

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

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

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

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