Quotes About Assimilation

Unless you somehow have a foot outside of your culture, the culture will swallow you whole.

Até um homem de mente fraca quer ser como os outros homens. Uma criança pode não saber como se alimentar, ou o que comer, mas ela conhece a fome.

reversing millions of years of human development by devouring all cultures on this planet and turning them into a single culture, our own.

Anyone that has come to America past the age of eighteen will be able to understand when I say that you can never shake your accent.

Having come to live in this age is as though one were to have entered another country. Learn its language or risk being left out.

When you become used to never being alone, you may consider yourself Americanised

Our own system of trying to guess what or how much a child's mind can assimilate results in cross purposes, misunderstanding, disappointments, anger and a general loss of harmony.

The Englishman does not so much make English civilization as it makes him; if he carries it wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner in Timbuktu, it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul.

Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.

India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.

It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no one's agenda and suited nobody's version of events. All sides seemed, for different reasons, to be slightly embarrassed by this moment of crossover, which they preferred to pretend had never happened. It is, after all, always easier to see things in black and white.

There is a limit to what a child can accept, assimilate; not to what it can believe because a child can believe anything, given time, but to what it can accept, a limit in time, in the very time which nourishes the believing of the incredible.

pues una de las más felices facultades de la mente humana es la de poder ignorar lo que la conciencia se niega a asimilar

People who would soon be seen in New York reading French books were seen here reading Italian.

The early years of a Bes (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learnings of cues. We pick up styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding oneself, very fast. Before we were eight or so most of us could be trusted not to breach embarrassingly and illegally, though licence of course is granted children every moment they are in the street.

I learned your language and I learned your rules. I am more like you than me now.

Du bist Nummer 55«, sagt Marga. Manuela blickt auf zu der Nummer über ihrem Schrank. Eine schwarze 55. »Deine Kleider tragen die Nummer 55. Deine Schuhe gehören in die Stiefelkammer in das Fach 55, dein Mantel und dein Hut kommen unten neben dem Hauseingang in die Garderobe, Abteilung 55. Deine Waschkabine ist Nummer 55, ebenso dein Bett.« Manuela fühlte, wie sie langsam zu Nummer Fünfundfünfzig wurde.

The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else, if not here in English. —GUSTAVO PÉREZ FIRMAT, "BILINGUAL BLUES

I found it a condescending expectation—that my words and mannerisms would meld into the mainstream around me—but it was also a fair question: how do you retain so strongly strands of somewhere or something you have never lived? - Nour Malas

And so it is that you learn how to pass, if you're lucky, to look like everyone else, even though you're broken inside.

I am learning to pretend, to smile and nod, to display empathy I do not feel. I am learning to pass, to look like everyone else, even though I feel broken inside.

I am learning to pretend, to smile and nod, to display

marrying Jim was like stepping into water the exact same temperature as the air. I barely had to adjust to the change.

She learned about Indian words that have been incorporated into American English, like moose and pecan and squash, and Penobscot words like kwai kwai, a friendly greeting, and woliwoni, thank you.