A biography for Ethel Watershasn’t been written yet.
“I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.”
“There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.”
“All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.”
“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.”
“I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.”
“It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.”
“Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.”
“We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.”
“Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.”
“I never was a child.”
“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 cannot help feeling I would have been happier with a husband and chidren of my own.”
“I am an isolationist.”
“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.”
“Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.”
“When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.”
“I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.”
“Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about 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.”
“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.”