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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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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Figures
Brother
Emotional
Life
Preeminent
Peers
Brothers
Male
Males

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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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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After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?
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Note, the reply will not be I write, an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.
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The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
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The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, no to that occasion, that poem is gone.
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I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
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When I was younger, yes, there was a part of me - and I wrote about that bit in Among the White Moon Faces - that wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be accepted by my brothers and to be their peers.
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People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even later when I grew up, I was constantly wearing dungarees, wearing guy shirts.
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In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.
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It is true that my characters have sex.
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Rather, the collapsing between act and condition, I am with I do, feels like authenticity, an authenticity of being. The muse rewarded me for a few months, after April of 2012, by giving me poems, almost a poem each day, that I can claim as coming from my writer's status.
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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
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John Milton famously claimed, Fame is the spur for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.
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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: I want, I want, I want!9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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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Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.
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This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not diagnosed for myself!
Shirley Geok-lin Lim