Quotes About Assimilation

It's common sense: when you move in, you try to learn the neighborhood.

The MacKinnons were always new, always almost just like everyone else. Always next door to normal. It was like growing up in the witness protection program without changing your name.

The brain is not nourished on beans and truffles but rather the food manages to reconstitute the molecules of the brain once it has been turned into homogeneous and assimilable substances, which potentially have the same nature, as the molecules of the brain

He is convinced--and what immigrant isn't?--that all Americans are crazy.

He even got used to living in a lack of privacy like that of a monkey in a Zoo. After a time he could without self-consciousness sit and read the Paris editions

If I behave as though this is a completely normal situation, then maybe it will be ...

It's millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you and, with it, they are ruining the schools, the hospitals, and a lot of life in America.

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

True learning involves learning other ways of doing what you can do already.

The researcher also discovered that as soon as a parishioner married a non-Pole (even if the spouse was Catholic) the rule was that "he must move out to a non-Polish Catholic parish.

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

The hyphenated American is ridiculous. But that's what we have to put up with. I think that any person that's in the United States is better off here than they would be where they came from.

It's like being raised by wolves -- you don't realize you're not one yourself until someone points it out to you. Sometimes it makes me so mad that not everyone treats me just like another wolf.

The warnings given to the Hebrews against assimilating with the heathen were not more direct or explicit than are those forbidding Christians to conform to the spirit and customs of the ungodly.

Omologarsi equivale a perdere di vista se stessi.

Like a serial killer, the house blended in. It suited its place and its place suited it.

A lot of the Indians who came to North America in the '70s, and who made very successful adjustments, always had an idea of the India that they had left, not realizing that the India that they had left has changed more profoundly than the America they came to.

I really miss being able to blend in with people.

I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a Russian American. But until recently I haven't focused so much on those parts of my identity. I've always thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated American.

Immigrants are people who leave one country, one society, and move to another society. But there has to be a recipient society to which the immigrants move.

With Lille, we could have gone to the South of France, and people wouldn't have recognised us. But at Chelsea, the players are at another level. Everything has changed - the language, the country - but it is up to me to adapt.

When I first came here, Italian food wasn't anything I recognized. I didn't know what Italian American food was; we never ate it at home. It was the food of immigrants who came here and made use of the ingredients they had.

I think that a lot of the stories I would see was kids who are first-generation immigrants, watching them try to rip themselves from their family and their faith and kind of erase. I hadn't really seen anything where someone's trying to reconcile the two.

I knew I was Chinese, but growing up, it never occurred to me that that had any particular implication or that it should differentiate me in any way. I thought it was a minor detail, like having red hair.