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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: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Brothers
Male
Males
Figures
Brother
Emotional
Life
Preeminent
Peers

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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In the poem C, the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems.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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I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem C. I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.
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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If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim