Quotes About Assimilation

I was German-speaking, and I arrived 10 years old to Croatia, and really wasn't speaking a lot at home with my parents in Croatian, so it was really difficult to write in Croatian. It took me two years after I went back to learn everything again in Croatian.

America has many cultures which makes it great, but it's difficult to create one strong identity.

I have a lot of cultures within me - I'm basically chop suey.

All my life, I have juggled two cultures: Senegalese and French.

Anytime you come to a new team and with a new player there is a learning curve.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner. You must be eating some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American.

As the daughter of immigrants, growing up in New York City, you are either at the table or on the menu.

They're completely American. When I served my son falafel in a pita the other day, he said, 'Daddy, this taco is very good.'

Even though I grew up in America, at home we spoke mostly Chinese, because my mom is from Taiwan.

Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation.

If we're so cruel to minorities, why do they keep coming here? Why aren't they sneaking across the Mexican border to make their way to the Taliban?

No, I didn't forget Samoan - I understand it when you talk to me but, you know, to put phrases together I sound like I do in English.

It's funny: I kinda still float under the radar. I'm not tall like a New York Knick; I'm not a heavy, strong New York Giant or New York Jet. I blend in pretty well. A lot of people don't recognize me too many places. More men recognize me than women.

In England, I'm just another tall guy!

Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated.

Her ülkede çocuklar o ülkenin dilini ö?renebilirler. Ama, bu memlekette Araplara, Rumlara, ya da Ermenilere Türkçe ö?retmeye kalk??t???n?z anda az?nl?klar derhal 'Az?nl?klara bask?, zulüm yap?l?yor' diye feryada ba?l?yorlar.

how you get used to it, how you make the new streets yours.

Her strategy for honoring the dead had always been to take action - solve the mystery, punish the criminal. But what did you do when there was no one to punish? When there were no answers to find? How do you assimilate that kind of loss without losing your mind?

English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it.

Southeast Asians almost never use chopsticks. If you go to Vietnam or Thailand or Cambodia, you never see a chopstick. Even in the boonies. They use forks and large spoons but when they come here and open a little restaurant they put out chopsticks because that's what Americans expect. Ain't life a bitch?

People need to discover their ethnic roots as an anchor in the face of a more cosmopolitan world.

What destroyed the Indian was not primarily political greed, land hunger, or military power, not the white man's germs or the white man's rum. What destroyed him was the manufactured products of a culture, iron and steel, guns, needles, woolen cloth, things that once possessed could not be done without."19

It's spoken with a shoulder shrug, a side-to-side of the head, and roll of the eyes. It means: I can't even fathom your reality, but I've decided to just accept it and move on.