Quotes About Assimilation

New York City has an integration problem.

I was made fun of in the Midwest - I was the only Asian in my graduating class of 200. Fortunately, I found my niche, and it was fine. But I wanted to be so white, you wouldn't believe it. I was like, 'I want to be white; I don't want to be this anymore.' But now I embrace it.

I knew I was Yoruba and Nigerian for the first 9 years of my life. I did not become conscious of my color and all that came with it until I moved to the United States with my family.

My dad was the only son from his entire family to come to America, and I was his only son. We had come to the States to achieve security and success for our family. Rules were simple: No fun, no friends, no girls. Go to school, come home, and study.

By the early seventies I had become an Englishman – that is to say, I hated England just as much as half of my compatriots seemed to do.

I was like a trashcan. I took everything.

If you live among wolves you have to act like a wolf.

If you live amoung wolves you have to act like a wolf.

there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can't even buy a decent bagel. I don't mean to make it sound as if it's all about being Jewish, but that's another thing about Washington. It makes you feel really Jewish if that's what you are.

there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can't even buy a decent bagel. I don't mean to make it sound as if it's all about being Jewish, but that's another thing about Washington. It makes you feel really Jewish if that's what you are. It's not just that there are so many Gentiles there; it's that the Gentiles are so Gentile. Listen, even the Jews there are sort of Gentile.

We're a land that absorbs our invaders, and makes them one of us.

The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.

We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.

She's not Italian in any way you'd notice. No garlic smell or big armpit hair. She came here to attend medical school. Frigging medical school. In Iowa. The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here. The

She's not Italian in any way you'd notice. No garlic smell or big armpit hair. She came here to attend medical school. Frigging medical school. In Iowa. The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

Here, in this waiting room, one could see a cross section of them—the hoppers, the creepers, the crawlers, the wrigglers, and rollers that came from the many planets, from so many stars. Earth was the galactic melting pot, he thought, a place where beings from the thousand stars met and mingled to share their thoughts and cultures.

He had given them everything that a human being had with the one exception of that most important thing of all -- the ability to exist within the human world.

a new wave of immigrants would replace the Irish, fleeing a different but no less abject country, the process starting anew. The engine huffed and groaned and kept running. They had merely switched the fuel that moved the pistons. The

Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.

London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them.

Learn Everything that is Good from Others, but bring it in, and in your own way absorb it; do not become others.

She entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one's own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly getting used to the strange creatures she found there

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses