Olivier Martinez Quotes

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.

As an immigrant, I learned by watching other people.

Moving to India was challenging being a foreigner. I don't have any family here. I didn't have anyone to guide me. But I never felt for a second that I am not welcome here.

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.

I moved from Italy to Oregon in the '80s - sort of like moving to the middle of a "Duck Dynasty" episode, which was massive culture shock to say the least.

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.

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.

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

I foresee death by culture shock.

Assimilation is really a psychological process where you come to identify with a new country as yours. The ease of overseas travel and information access interferes with that.

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.

Culture shock is often felt sharply at the borders between countries, but sometimes it doesn't hit fully until you've been in a place for a long time.

In addition to the research, I enjoyed learning French and assimilating the culture of another country.

Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.

It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.

Being uprooted from your own culture, provided you take with you the way of thinking and being that characterises the more integrated social culture from which you come, is not as disruptive to happiness and well-being as becoming part of a relatively fragmented culture.

In China, I realized that if you visit often enough and learn the language, you will be assimilated, but you'll still be kept at arm's length; you'll always be looked on as a foreigner.

It's hard when you are trying to ingratiate yourself in a completely foreign world. It takes a long time.

People don't know what it's like being the foreigner until they are one.

I'm excited to share my experience as an immigrant assimilating to a new country and an outsider stumbling my way into Hollywood.

Our society offers little in the way of reeducation for those who have been torn away from their traditional culture and suddenly exposed to all the blandishments of mass culture-even the churches which follow the hillbillies to the city often make use of the same "hard sell" that the advertisers and politicians do.

Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.

ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: 'You wouldn't understand it there, mother - they hug where I live now.'

I'm opposed to wearing headscarves in public places. That's not France. There's something I just don't understand: the people who come to France, why would they want to change France, to live in France the same way they lived back home?

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.