 All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic. |
| We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can. |
| Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk. |
| I never was a child. |
| There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing. |
| We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available. |
| I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty. |
| I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down. |
| Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news. |
| It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays. |
| 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. |
| Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me. |
| I am an isolationist. |
| We are all gifted. That is our inheritance. |
| My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them. |
| I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out. |
| Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again. |
