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The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Problem
Body
Memoir
Something
Studied
Theme
Treat
Treats
Female
Doe

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
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One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
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Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics.
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Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
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When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.
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I do want to do the entire alphabet. There's in [Walker's Alphabet] a poem called A Life in that grouping. I was going to change that title to A.
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No one, evidently, except me has found No Alarms poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write.
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Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.
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I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.
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The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.
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When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.
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Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.
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The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and the poet, my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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The Chinese traditionally have revered age and longevity - I have one and hope for the other! - so, in Taipei, a city-hub for global Chinese who dis-identify with the People's Republic of China's construction of a Communist nationalist Chineseness, I called on the Chinese muse of writing to witness my emergence out of the academic woods.
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You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem C. I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.
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Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim