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" 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. "

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" Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me. "

" 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. "

" Though I was excited about the Sojourner Truth play, it was not reassuring to think that my entire future might depend on the success of that one show. "

" We are all gifted. That is our inheritance. "

" It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays. "

" There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business. "

" I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty. "

" I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow. "

" 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. "

" Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk. "

" When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege. "

" We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can. "

" Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners. "

" No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer. "

" Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races. "

" My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them. "

" 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. "

" Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news. "

" There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been. "

" Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down. "