Amanda

“I’m not sure if this is assimilation, if all this was part of it and this is how other people have experienced it, too. That assimilation has always required that one believed the old country was old and left behind for a reason, and we must never speak of it because we are Americans now, which means we speak perfect English at all times and never Spanish at home or anywhere else and our history is the Revolution and Valley Forge and the Battle of Gettysburg and four score to seven years ago our fathers who art in heaven do highly resolve that these dead should not have died in vain, and to the republic for which it stands one nation under hamburgers and strip malls with peace and injustice for all.”
― Robert Lopez, Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure

“I have become quite set in my ways, so everything has to be just so -- the time I wake and the manner in which I prepare my food and tend to my house and body have to be very particular. If I sleep too late, or wear the wrong thing for the weather, the whole day becomes skewed, and no matter what I do I know that things will not go as I had planned and my thoughts begin to spiral, so I turn back to the point of the day in which the error was made, and I play it over and over again in my mind, castigating myself for my misdemeanor, then recreate the day once more but with that subtle change, showing myself how it might have been so much nicer, so much more perfect, if only I had eaten the fava beans rather than the fennel with my lunch, or waited to read Baudelaire until after five in the afternoon, or cleaned my plate directly after using it rather than leaving it to form a tenacious and unsightly stain, and then I think and think what a consummate idiot I have been, and how to improve my conduct the next time the occasion presents itself.”
― Kathryn Bromwich, At the Edge of the Woods