cultural acclimatization Quotes

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.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

Well I'm living in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line. Beauty walks a razor's edge...someday I'll make it mine.

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 reflect back on my mom's journey, someone who was an immigrant to Canada and came not knowing anything and figured it out tremendously. I reflect back on that a lot.

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 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.

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.

I went to Paris in 1989 when the Americans didn't quite know what to do with me at first. Now, all those years later, it's kind of the same story. Not the same scenario, but kind of the same story.

I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport.

Growing up in Bombay made me immune to culture shock, in a way. So, culture shock is not part of my DNA.

I know that some poor immigrants from that era had unrealistic expectations and were disappointed, but I don't think my grandparents were disappointed at all, even though they experienced some very hard times during the Great Depression.

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

People adjust their behavior to fit the society they live in. They integrate because they have to. But what they are on the inside doesn't change.