Quotes About Assimilation

After two centuries here, why are we still not Americans? Why do we keep falling out of the story?

Maybe it's the dream of the open highway. The romantic myth of the West. A reminder that these funny little Orientals have actually been Americans longer than you have.

To be yellow in America...a special guest star, forever the guest. Fade to black.

Having found the book which has a message for us, let us not be guilty of the folly of saying we have read it. We might as well say we have breakfasted, as if breakfasting on one day should last us for every day! The book that helps us deserves many readings, for assimilation comes by slow degrees.

And history teaches that what a culture can't assimilate it destroys

The Negro is the child of two cultures — Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures.

He was trying to find his footing in a world both familiar and foreign

I've now been in this country for thirteen years, since I was seventeen. So this is my second home.

My mother named me Tomislav, and my father was a Bokši?. After my first week in the US, I'd become Tom Boksic. Which then led to Toxic.

To read forward Why should Europeans not be able to read, even when we write in the language they understand? They cannot read because they (as "Europeans," caught in the snare of an exhausted but self-nostalgic metaphor) are assimilating what they read back into that snare and into what they already know – and are thus incapable of projecting it forward into something they may not know and yet might be able to learn.

With the coming of these people who know the language, we are losing our liberty to speak, he remarked to himself.

Well, I might even get used to the idea that she had no tail.

I want to deal with somebody who comes from another country to the United States and has a family that comes. I don't care if it's a black family from Jamaica or a Hispanic family from Mexico. These issues need to be dealt with, but they need to be dealt with in the entertaining way.

that was New York for you, always changing. New groups of people came in on a daily basis. Some people liked it, some people continued to hate foreigners, even though they themselves had been the foreigners of a previous decade or century.

We are encouraged to believe in our dreams, but we are assumed to dream in the same limited palette as everyone else. We are to view ourselves as unique snowflakes only as it facilitates more efficiently melting ourselves into bottled spring water.

You have to help him unlearn it. You have to help him see that if he's disappearing from the world, that's too high a price to pay for fitting in.

Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons. Standing

when foreigners used American profanity. The swear words always seemed too big to fit in their mouths and were spit out rather than spoken, like a glob of tough meat they couldn't chew and didn't dare try to swallow.

enjoy such quintessentially Chinese experiences as the Madame Tussauds wax museum, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Sunglass Hut.

I was suffering from culture shock before the phrase was coined

Japan will never change. It will never ever integrate gaijin, and my darling, here you will always be a gaijin and never Japanese. Book 3, p467

There is a lizard called the chameleon that, as you probably know, can change color instantly to blend into its surroundings. Besides being slimy and clod-blooded, Captain Sham resembled the chameleon in that he was chameleonic, a word means 'able to blend in with any situation.

They can teach you anything. That doesn't mean you learn it. It doesn't mean you believe it.

In America, your ancestors don't matter so much. You're just you .