Quotes About Assimilation

I think there are a lot of misconceptions on both sides, the developing vs. the developed world, especially about America. I've felt the frustration in my lack of belonging to any one place, but I've also felt it liberating to be able to appreciate something without feeling disloyal to my own culture.

In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.

I love observing both vocally and by sight. So I take on a lot of those elements of people around me.

I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.

Most of the people I've met who are black in other countries look up to the blacks in this country. Though they may talk differently, they are anxious to partake of this country simply because things in their country are not physically on par with what they are here.

Its aim is to reconcile you to "the way it is," to make you exactly like everyone else, to render you amenable to societal order and discipline.

For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved to in assimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.

It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved too inassimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.

She said the wrong thing or sounded like a space alien with bad programming, when all she wanted was to be just like everyone else. "I meant are you okay now

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.

During the twentieth century, America recorded its highest percentage of foreign-born residents in 1910: 14.7 percent of the population. A century later, about 40 million people or nearly 13 percent of Americans today are foreign-born citizens.

It's almost like that's the definition of being American: You love becoming Irish for a day, or becoming Italian… Or becoming a Negro for four years.

I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, and I don't even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there'd be no problem. Those Hunkies that just got off the boat, they're already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren't Americans yet.

Whereas books, once read, become fully a part of us.

we're a "lower order of people" in one breath we are damned for being "unassailable" and the next there is fear that we'll assimilate. ... If we are educated, the complaint is that we will cease being the "ideal servant".

Abandonar un país era un juego de niños. Un trueque de colores y no de vida. El desarraigo no tenía color, en cambio. A uno le daba igual vivir en cualquier parte y nacer aquí o allá era un accidente. Uno era un camaleón, los países y la gente meros decorados. Tal

I see you are already learning our beautiful language.

Or should one recognize that one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within?

Good Lord," Colin muttered. "One would think I'd joined this family yesterday. Of course I bribed her." He turned to Penelope. "No offense to recent additions.

I can always tell when Indian people are born in America. They have the most American accent.

Even though many Indians can read or speak English, for most, it is not their first language. At the office, we speak in English, but we consume our culture in our own language.

Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English.

If, for 2,000 years, you dress up differently, believe in a different God, celebrate different holidays, and on top of it insist on telling everyone that you're completely different than them, ultimately they'll believe you.