Creativity Quote by Ethel Waters

Shyness, in Ethel Waters hands, isn’t a dainty personality trait; it’s a scar with manners. “I have reason to be shy” flips the usual framing. She doesn’t apologize for being guarded, and she doesn’t romanticize it either. The sentence reads like a quiet refusal to perform openness on demand - a boundary set in plain language. Then she lands the punchline that isn’t a punchline: “I’ve been hurt plenty.” Not once, not vaguely, but enough to make caution feel earned. “Plenty” is doing heavy lifting: it’s fatigue, it’s accumulation, it’s the kind of suffering that stops being a dramatic event and becomes weather.

Waters was a Black woman who came up through vaudeville, nightclubs, and Broadway in an era that commodified her voice while policing her life. Fame didn’t insulate her; it exposed her. The entertainment economy asked performers, especially women, to be endlessly available - emotionally, socially, sexually - while offering little protection when audiences, managers, press, or partners took what they wanted. In that context, shyness becomes strategy: a way to keep some part of yourself unbought.

The line also carries a performer’s double consciousness. Waters spent her career communicating feeling for a living; here she hints at the cost of that fluency. It’s a small act of self-authorship: she names the wound without narrating it, claims the right to privacy without pretending she’s untouched.