Quotes About Assimilation

I grew up in the classic American-Jewish suburbia, which has a whole different sense of what it means to be Jewish than anywhere else in the world.

Being an Indian in the U.S. and growing up in the suburbs were the two things that really shaped my outlook.

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, the color of my skin and my rather peculiar background as an Ethiopian immigrant delineated the border of my life and friendships. I learned quickly how to stand alone.

To me, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and my identity is of a suburban Chicago person. It's not like, 'Oh, I'm Indian.' I'm not. I'm American.

Second, self and world cannot be known independently of each other: "[I]t is through progressive construction that the concepts of the physical world and of the internal self will become elaborated as a function of each other, and the processes of assimilation and accommodation are only instruments of this construction without ever representing the actual result of it" (OI, p. 136).

for example, in grasping a new toy, this toy is assimilated to the grasping scheme, the toy attains the functional meaning of being "graspable.

During this substage, infants start to reciprocally assimilate or coordinate two different schemes. For example, infants grasp what they are seeing, and they move in front of their eyes what they are grasping.

Slowly but surely life becomes normal, and a man gets used to it, it doesn't happen any other way.

There was an old Qeng Ho saying, "You know you've stayed too long when you start using the locals' calendar.

Really the best way to learn about something is simply to read it and not make a scientific theory of interpretation.

Swipe from the best, then adapt.

Whoever said "When in Rome, do as the Romans do", has never driven a car there.

In the end the natives would be so mixed and mingled with the new settlers that the term Saxon or Angle ceased to have any meaning. All would become English.

a foreigner often feels most foreign while witnessing the early education of another culture.

I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow. (Quoted by Josh Foer in Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything)

La forma en la que no te miran es casi japonesa.

I've just read it so much, it memorized itself.

I never wanted to be Protestant. Jews do, plenty of them. Not me. To be assimilated, to be respectable, to be detached like the Wasps, I understand the desire, but I knew never to try. I see all those distinguished Wasps with the beautiful gray hair and the pinstripe suits who don't have pimples on their ass. They're my lawyers....These guys are quiet. I don't want to be that way. I couldn't begin to be that way. I'm the wild Jew of the pampas. I am the Golem of the U.S.A.

Without an old country link and a strangling church like the Italians, or the Irish, or the Poles, without generations of the American forebears to bind you to American life, or blind you by your loyalties to its deformities, you could read whatever you wanted and write however and whatever you pleased. Alienated? Just another way to say 'set free.' A Jew set free from Jews - yet only by steadily maintaining self-consciousness as a Jew. That was the thrilling paradoxical kicker.

What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else.

Conflictul interior al evreilor care vor s? se confunde cu ceilalÈ›i È™i, în acelaÈ™i timp, s? ias? în eviden??, care insist? c? sînt diferiÈ›i È™i care insist? c? nu sînt cu nimic diferiÈ›i...

Stop acting like a Terran. Be a Hellan.

I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

that the two key factors converge. Assimilation, understood in the idiosyncratic sense above, ensured ongoing cultural vitality, allowing Jews to survive for millennia in a variety of settings beyond their homeland. Antisemitism, meanwhile, guaranteed that the path of Jews to full integration was frequently blocked. Unlikely as it may seem, these two forces have interacted, allowing Jews to persist, when many other groups faded.