Wallace Stevens Quotes

I love playing in America. I feel having been there a few times that I "get" America a lot more than I used to. It used to be so strange to me. It takes years to learn how to separate the actual, major, important differences from the superficial differences that aren't essential or crucial.

When I land in a new country, I'm a tourist. I can't become a local in one day.

I like to live like a local. When you are somewhere, you have to try to take the culture of that place and try to adapt.

I was very surprised when I first started spending time in America. The culture shock was something I wasn't prepared for. I had a lot of work to do to try to begin to understand this enormous and complex country that I thought would be an easy process.

When you are at Rome, do as you see.

Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign.

You know if you're in Rome, live in the Roman way. I grew up there, I was born there, and so I should follow its guidelines, live like a Korean. And I really love Korea. I grew up listening to Korean music, and was able to get to where I am because of it.

If you move here from somewhere else, I often think if I move to Germany, for example, or if I move China and I go worship there I will understand and I'll be willing to give up a lot of my culture because I'm in somebody else's homeland. So I'm going to have to act German or Chinese, whatever that might mean.

That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires-risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence.

I've always believed that what can make a domestic setting truly home is the infusion of a cultural dimension.

I live a very international life, but when I come back to Hollywood, a town I love in a lot of ways, I have to wonder, "What decade are you in? Like, seriously, what decade? It's not this one."

The greater the man, the more he is soaked in the atmosphere of his time; only thus can he get a wide enough grasp of it to be able to change substantially the pattern of knowledge and action.

What I can't understand is why come here and try and change our country into the place that you've come from? And all I ask of people is come here, respect our country, respect our laws, our culture, our way of life. Be Australian, join us, enjoy this beautiful country and everything that it has to offer.

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

Sometimes I thought of the Peace Corps as a reverse refugee organization, displacing all of us lost Midwesterners, and it was probably the only government entity that taught Americans to abandon key national characteristics. Pride, ambition, impatience, the instinct to control, the desire to accumulate, the missionary impulse - all of it slipped away.

I've travelled a lot, but I am essentially American. All my input has been American.

But that constant adjustment and adaptation to your new environment, all the variables are the same. There's always a promoter, there's always a rider, there's always a shower, and there's always a stage.

Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences.

One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives.

By various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.

We're continuing to evolve into what we think we can do, and you know that takes a little bit of times sometimes to figure out what you're really good at and what you can hang her hat on per se, and I think we're learning that each week that goes by.

It’s a matter of time; you adapt to the different culture and different way of life. Human beings are adaptable.

When people travel here from across the country, they shed jealousies and politics and prejudices. The mighty climb down. The humble are elevated.