Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am an isolationist.
There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
I am somebody cause God don't make no junk
We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.
I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.
I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.
No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.
Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.
There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.
What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.
I could always open shows, perform through the middle, and close shows.
I have always been psychic. The walls of any room I walk into talk to me.
We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.
I don't care to dress up except when it is necessary or good for my business.
Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
Today I blame only certain agents for my long eclipse as a public entertainer.
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.
You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.
There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.
I cannot help feeling I would have been happier with a husband and chidren of my own.
My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
I never posed as a saint. I would have slept with a man for nothing if I liked him well enough.
It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.
Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
I dressed plain, but my partners were always spending more money on clothes than I could afford.
I could depend a lot on my shaking, though I never shimmied vulgarly and only to express myself.
My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.
Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.
If I wanted pity, I got it because I'm illegitimate. And when I didn't want it I was mean and nasty.
Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
I found that a couple of bottles of beer would give me a lift, but the third bottle would sober me up.
We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
There had been lots of crises in my life. And there was plenty of spunk and battle cry still left in me.
The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.
New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.
We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.
Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.
I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
I'm not afraid to die. I'm looking forward to it. I know the Lord has His arms wrapped around this big sparrow.
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've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.