Quotes About Assimilation

First grade was - I spoke only Spanish, and second grade - probably a bit more English. And by the time I hit third grade, I was learning, of course, much, much more English.

Life is like breakfast: you just mix all ingredients 'cause in your stomach it will all come together.

Fletcherism. The U.S. Army Medical Department issued formal instructions for a "Method of Attaining Economic Assimilation of Nutriment"—aka the Fletcher system. ("Masticate all solid food until it is completely liquefied," begins the familiar refrain.)

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.

It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks.

Nested in the soft, forgiving bosom of America's consumer culture, I felt safe; it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation.

But still, I'd be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation.

colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.

That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

Her English, though accented, was idiomatic. She would have learned it young enough to pick up the idiom, but not quite young enough to eradicate the accent.

My American and Japanese personalities are distinct, and I carry myself differently depending on which language I'm using and which mode I'm in.

For if I am interesting to you precisely to the extent that I'm not one of you, then your desire to civilize me, to turn me into a good citizen of Nuremberg, can lead to nothing but loss of interest.

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

The thing I love about Vegas is that it's a melting pot. It's like working Ellis Island.

What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement." —BERTRAND RUSSELL, "The Study of Mathematics" (1902)

la grandeza del hombre consiste en que puede asimilar lo que le es desconocido. Asimilar, en la profundidad, es dar respuesta.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

The wisdom lay in this–that here she must remain Manchu, Chinese; any attempt to become a part of this incomprehensible country, any effort to involve herself in its mysterious acts or thought, would be disastrous. She must remain calm, unassertive, let the eternal Tao take its way.

The old debate on whether or not the Chinese or the Vietnamese made the best American food ran through my head. Everyone knew that you couldn't depend on a North American–run place, because gringos just aren't good at such things.

Your job here in this Workshop is to assimilate data that you have been collecting from your real-life experiences (as you have been interacting with others and moving in and out of your physi-cal environment). Your work here is to bring the data together in a sort of picture of yourself, one that satisfies and pleases you.

Don't try to pound them into your framework like square pegs into round holes.

In Revelation 10, John] eats the book—not just reads it—he got it into his nerve endings, his reflexes, his imagination. The book he ate was the Holy Scripture. Assimilated into his worship and prayer, his imagining and writing, the book he ate was metabolized into the book he wrote.

I'm French - it's less important. Meaning, I remain a Frenchman in America, but I adapt to American culture. I feel good there - but I'm still a foreigner.

When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States.