Top 100 Ethel's Quotes
#1. And what if Britain lost? There would be a financial crisis, unemployment, and destitution. Working-class men would take up Ethel's father's cry and say that they had never been allowed to vote for the war. The people's rage against their rulers would be boundless.
Ken Follett
#2. I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
Ethel Waters
#3. As far as dramas are concerned, it's considered passe for playwrights to turn out anything the average person can understand.
Ethel Merman
#4. I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers ...
David Foster Wallace
#5. Remember what your own Shelley says: 'The past is Death's, the future is thine own.' Take it, while it is still yours, and fix your mind, not on what you may have done long ago to hurt, but on what you can do now to help.
Ethel Lilian Voynich
#6. If you do a musical, it's really thrilling and it's a lot of work, but it's very rewarding. I would say, for me, what I like best is what I do, which is, I call it vaudeville, I call it live, I call it in concert, I call it what Bette Midler does, and what Garland did for years, and Ethel Merman.
Debbie Reynolds
#7. What his son, Marty, never fully understood was that deep down there was an Ethel-shaped hole in Henry's life, and without her, all he felt was the draft of loneliness, cold and sharp, the years slipping away like blood from a wound that never heals.
Jamie Ford
#8. 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.
Ethel Waters
#9. I quite agree with you that it is detestably malicious. But the worst thing about it is that it's all true.
Ethel Lilian Voynich
#10. None of the seven is really good, for the excellent reason that Australian children never are.
Ethel Turner
#11. That's the worst of doctors. They are so keen about the body, but they don't study the soul at all.
Ethel M. Dell
#12. I haven't hurt you ... if I have, it's the faithful wound of a friend.
Ethel M. Dell
#13. What broke Mom's heart was realizing that her children knew nothing and cared nothing about the better side of life.
Ethel Waters
#14. I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
Ethel Waters
#15. I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
Ethel Waters
#16. At a flea market I always head for the junk jewelry table first.
Ethel Merman
#17. I am somebody cause God don't make no junk
Ethel Waters
#18. The three theater peeps I would love to dine with are Mel Brooks, because he is so funny; Stephen Sondheim, because he is a god-like genius; and Ethel Merman, to compare notes on fabulous belting.
Nancy Allen
#20. Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.
Ethel Waters
#22. Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
Ethel Waters
#23. She made a gesture of impatience. 'Do you never think of the future?'
'Not in your presence,' laughed Nick. 'I think of you - you - and only you. Didn't you know?
Ethel M. Dell
#24. Musicals have clearly gotten more physical. You never saw Ethel Merman doing step aerobics.
Bruce Vilanch
#25. So Captain Faith conducted the prince and his mighty captains and men of war into the castle in the very heart of Mansoul. Prince Emmanuel had come home.
Ethel Barrett
#27. They kill me because they are afraid of me; and what more can any man's heart desire?
Ethel Lilian Voynich
#28. Mary Martin was Broadway's biggest closet king. Everyone thought Ethel (Merman) was butch and maybe a lesbian, but she wasn't. And everyone thought that lovely little Mary was Miss Femme, and she was
except next to her gay husband. In other words, don't judge a star by her cover.
Bob Fosse
#29. I worshipped Ethel Merman and I worshipped Ethel Merman a lot. It's incredible - Ethel Merman was a conventional singer. Her naming her child Ethel Merman, Jr., was, to me, one of the coolest feminist things.
Beth Ditto
#30. A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.
Ethel Wilson
#31. My dream dinner party guests would be Ethel Kennedy, Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson.
Dylan Penn
#32. 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.
Ethel Waters
#33. 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
#34. All quiet along the Potomac tonight, no sound save the rush of the river, while soft falls the dew on the face of the dead, the picket's off duty forever.
Ethel Lynn Beers
#35. Perhaps some guest editors would keep Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in their peripheral vision. But Sylvia recognized their execution as the most extreme and gruesome example of McCarthy's red-baiting paranoia.
Elizabeth Winder
#36. I don't know what he means, but there's something not clean about a man who sneers at everything.
Ethel Lilian Voynich
#37. There's such a thing as theater discipline. One player doesn't appropriate another's inventions.
Ethel Merman
#38. Now what kind of an attitude is that, 'These things happen?' They only happen because this whole country is just full of people who, when these things happen, they just say, 'These things happen,' and that's why they happen! We gotta have control of what happens to us.
Ethel Merman
#39. I love humility in a woman. It's so rare. With man, of course, it is practically extinct.
Ethel M. Dell
#40. Night after night I went to sleep murmuring, 'To-morrow I will be easy, strong, quick, supple, accurate, dashing and self-controlled all at once!' For not less than this is necessary in the Game of Life called Golf.
Ethel Smyth
#41. Quite a small spoke is enough to stop a wheel - even a mighty big wheel - if it's going too fast.
Ethel M. Dell
#43. Be yourself
it's the one thing you can do better than anyone else.
Ethel Merman
#45. Ethel Merman would stay with a show for years and tour with it. So would Mary Martin, the great stars. They recognized the value of that success and nurtured it. Now, you come from Hollywood, you play 12 weeks and go away. I don't think that's the best policy.
Harold Prince
#46. When we lost Bobby, I would wake up in the morning and think, 'He's OK. He's in Heaven, and he's with Jack and a lot of my brothers and sisters and my parents.' So it made it very easy to get through the day thinking he was OK.
Ethel Kennedy
#47. The bad principle is that any man should hold over another the power to bind and loose. It's a false relationship to stand in towards one's fellows
Ethel Lilian Voynich
#51. 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.
Ethel Waters
#52. Mom claimed that I could carry a tune at 2 or 3 years of age. Maybe she was a little prejudiced.
Ethel Merman
#53. The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure - if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.
Ethel Barrymore
#54. If you have found the way of sacrifice, the way that leads to peace; if you have joined with loving comrades to bring deliverance to them that weep and mourn in secret; then see to it that your soul be free from envy and passion and your heart as an altar where the sacred fire burns eternally.
Ethel Lilian Voynich
#55. I feel I must fight for [my music], because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea.
Ethel Smyth
#56. Life Insurance Motto - Robbing the widows early and orphan.
Ethel Mumford
#57. 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
#58. My first paid role was my first job out of drama school, which was 'Just William.' It was a BBC TV show. I played Ethel.
Lily James
#59. Death is the opening-and the closing-of a Door.
Ethel M. Dell
#60. If you take passionate interest in a subject, it is hard not to believe yourself specially equipped for it.
Ethel Smyth
#62. My cat, Ethel, is an indoor cat but somehow she's sneakin' out at night. 'Cause the other morning I found a stamp on her paw ... I wouldn't have noticed myself, but I just bought this new black light and she passed right under it and I said, 'Hey, what's that on you paw?
Ellen DeGeneres
#63. I've never suffered stage fright. That fascinates people.
Ethel Merman
#65. The training of children is such a serous thing, and it means so much to them to be surrounded from the very beginning with good influences, that I should have thought the holier a man's vocation and the purer his life, the more fit he is to be a father
Ethel Lilian Voynich
#67. My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
Ethel Waters
#68. I'd carry the mail for you, Ethel,
Stop running around with that pup,
He's got a car, sure, and jack to throw
Like water but what does he want?
What do they all want? something easy,
Something that somebody else worked for.
Ethel, lay off rich kids, you'll end dirty.
Kenneth Patchen
#69. We learn the inner secret of happiness when we learn to direct our inner drives, our interest and our attention to something besides ourselves.
Ethel Percy Andrus
#70. Fundamentally I feel that there is as much difference between the stage and the films as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can't become a virtuoso in both.
Ethel Barrymore
#72. We would worry less about what others think of us if we realized how seldom they do.
Ethel Barrett
#73. I am rather observant, and have a habit of putting things together. I tell you that so that you may be careful when you don't want me to know a thing.
Ethel Lilian Voynich
#74. All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
Ethel Waters
#75. For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of a Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a MaCaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinocerus.
Ethel Barrymore
#76. I am purely evil;
Hear the thrum
of my evil engine;
Evilly I come.
The stars are thick as flowers
In the meadows of July;
A fine night for murder
Winging through the sky.
Ethel Mannin
#77. You don't give up on democracy every time you lose a vote, Ethel said crisply.
Ken Follett
#78. The old men were still running the country. The politicians who had caused millions of deaths were now celebrating, as if they had done something wonderful.
Ken Follett
#79. Always give them the old fire, even when you feel like a squashed cake of ice.
Ethel Merman
#80. I preferred delivering my performance in person. I liked to be in control. You couldn't be in films.
Ethel Merman
#82. If you are going to say a thing the substance of which is a big pill for your readers to swallow, there is no use in frightening them at the beginning by the form.
Ethel Lilian Voynich
#84. I found that a couple of bottles of beer would give me a lift, but the third bottle would sober me up.
Ethel Waters
#85. If you see something wrong, if you speak out ... you can change it.
Ethel Kennedy
#86. The doors of Opportunity are marked 'Push' and 'Pull'.
Ethel Mumford
#87. Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.
Ethel Waters
#88. 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
#89. You'll never prove you're too good for a job by not doing your best.
Ethel Merman
#90. Only a mother's heart can be
Patient enough for such as he.
Ethel Lynn Beers
#91. When I first went on the stage I was 17 and under the legal age for performers.
Ethel Waters
#92. I've never cooked. I can't do much more in the kitchen than make a cup of tea and some toast.
Ethel Merman
#93. Elia Kazan understood my problems. He was able to bring out the very best in me. He gave me credit for my intelligence.
Ethel Waters
#94. Though I was a Catholic, I recognized that Protestant churches had something.
Ethel Waters
#95. People have a way of thinking that everything is finished when the very best of all may yet be in store.
Ethel M. Dell
#96. I work as often as I want and yet I'm free as a bird.
Ethel Merman
#97. Well, it so happens that I have had a spinal curvature since I was about thirteen and every once in a while that has given me some trouble, and at that time it began to kick up again. and occasionally I have to get into bed and nurse a severe backache.
Julius And Ethel Rosenberg
#98. I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
Ethel Waters
#99. My beloved Mom and Pop always rated tops with each other, and that's the way it will always be.
Ethel Merman
#100. The best time to make friends is
before you need them.
Ethel Barrymore
