Quotes About Assimilation

In American, when I was young, my parents always seemed to be in mourning for something. Now I understand: it must have been the language.

When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. You breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.

Once back on Pemberton Road, in the modest house that is suddenly mammoth, there is nothing to remind them; in spite of the hundred or so relatives they've just seen, they feel as if they are the only Gangulis in the world. The people they have grown up with will never see this life, of this they are certain.

Our meals, our actions, were only a shadow of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of where Mr. Pirzada really belonged. At

La lingua è vera, ma la maniera in cui la assorbo e utilizzo sembra finita. Un lessico cercato acquisito, resta per sempre anomalo, come se fosse artefatto, anche se non lo è.

Writing in another language reactivates the grief of being between two worlds, of being on the outside. Of feeling alone and excluded.

Until now Ashima has accepted that there is no one to sweep the floor, or do the dishes, or wash clothes, or shop for groceries, or prepare a meal on the days she is tired or homesick or cross. She has accepted that the very lack of such amenities is the American way.

Like the rest of their Bengali friends, [Gogol's] parents expect him to be, if not an engineer, then a doctor, a lawyer, an economist at the very least. These were the fields that brought them to America, his father repeatedly reminds him, the professions that have earned them security and respect.

as they near his apartment, he leans toward the plexiglass and says to the driver, in Bengali, 'It's that one, up on the right.' The driver turns around, surprised, smiling. 'I didn't realize,' he says. 'That's okay,' Gogol says, reaching for his wallet. He tips the driver excessively and steps out of the car.

No go sections of the city and they work on law and the police don't go in there. That is not helping anything [in immigrants' assimilation]. That creates a situation like France, unfortunately.

Try and fit in in a New Zealand playground with an Armagh accent - it doesn't work.

I stuck out more in an English public school than I would have had I marched in a May Day parade with the Red Army in Moscow or sashayed the Yves St. Laurent catwalk with supermodels or hunted seals with the Inuit or - well, you get the idea.

The public library is where I studied. It's where my grandfather taught himself English.

At Liverpool, I studied Steven Gerrard all the time and improved my game that way. Here, I absorb all I can from Iniesta and Messi.

Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians and Irish, the Chinese and Japanese - everything you learned in sixth grade social studies about the great American melting pot.

I'm struck by how impressively John Elliott assimilated new work on early modern England and colonial America, as well as keeping abreast with his own Hispanic studies, so as to write his recent 'Empires of the Atlantic World.'

I was just stunned when I came to America. I didn't know anything about rock music or football, and I felt very out of it... America was like a foreign country to me at first.

The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren't American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.

I am opposed to a multicultural France. I think that those who have a different culture and who arrive in France have to submit themselves to French culture.

I always feel like you should walk into a room or walk down the street, like you belong. That's the philosophy that I always try to subscribe to.

It was this society and culture that among other things - including economic opportunities here and repression in Europe - attracted subsequent generations of immigrants to this country.

Some of the substance of English words, I just don't understand at all because the culture's so strange to me.

Assimilation of the fruits of each past life takes place before the spirit descends to rebirth, and consequently, the character generated is fully formed and readily expressed in the subtle, mobile mind-stuff of the Region of Concrete Thought, where the archetype of the coming dense body is built.

I always found it interesting when you went off to college, people would talk about how you go and search for your own identity. A lot of suburban middle-class kids would be shopping for identities and they would co-opt identities from other cultures.