A Quote by Ethel Waters

My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them. — © Ethel Waters
My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.
Family was even a bigger word than I imagined, wide and without limitations, if you allowed it, defying easy definition. You had family that was supposed to be family and wasn't, family that wasn't family but was, halves becoming whole, wholes splitting into two; it was possible to lack whole, honest love and connection from family in lead roles, yet to be filled to abundance by the unexpected supporting players.
No one in my family plays music. But since I was very little, I would go around the house singing and dancing. And when I was 8, my parents asked me to get up and sing something at a family meal. I had my eyes closed, singing - la la la la la - and when I opened them, the whole family was crying.
What is a family without love? And by family I don't just mean a packed kitchen table with a hoard of children around it. A family can be made up of any number of people. Me and my fiancee are our own little family, a family of two (and the dog!), and our love is at the heart of that.
The overall goal [of counseling] is to help family members become 'systems experts' who could know [their] family system so well that the family could readjust itself without the help of an expert.
I had five brothers and sisters. Four of them older, and some of them played instruments, and we would get together and have family recitals and raise money for the church. I belonged to a wonderful church community that encouraged me to sing.
Everyone in my family can sing - my momma can sing, my cousins. I was in the third grade and I was that kid who was so bad in school because I could sing.
Well, I think one of the big things wrong with kids these days, a lot of them don't have a family. A lot of them got one parent and there's quite a few that don't have any parents and that's where the whole problem is. There's no family life, no father to slap 'em around when they need it.
Every family had its own peculiar cult, to which no stranger was ever admitted, and which alone could appease and satisfy the gods of that family. The cult was handed down from father to son, from generation to generation, and could not be lost without condemning the whole series of ancestors to eternal misery.
What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. Cora was right - we had many families over time. Our family of origion, the family we created, as well as the gorups you moved thorugh while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them were perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. You couldn't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it.
You have one family, Charley. For good or bad. You have one family. You can’t trade them in. You can’t lie to them. You can’t run two at once, substituting back and forth. “Sticking with your family is what makes it a family.
You know, it comes from my mother's side of the family. She had seven sisters and one brother, and all of them could play instruments. I suppose I picked it up from that.
Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop - then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.
We must realize our own talents and, having realized, accept them; and play on them like a symphony in which all other instruments are harmonized to make a better universe.
"What is normal?" really becomes the question. What is normal, and how are we fooled into thinking it's something other than what we're doing at any given time. Every family has either a drug addict or an alcoholic or some sort of dysfunction that the family is dealing with. And I think the grace of this family is that they actually could be that far out there but also be forgiving, and be really human, and be human in front of each other without much shame.
If you take care of the woman in the family, the whole family prospers. But when the mother falters, the family falls apart.
My whole family was in 'Into the West' as a pioneer family; they're in the audience in 'The Great Debaters.' My family's been getting a lot of work off me!
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