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I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.

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
Surrounded
Complaining
Men
Neglected
Muse

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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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.
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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In a way, this kind of insight or recognition often permeates the way I think of character, how I plot action, and the way in which I use imagery, seeing binaries as false.
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 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'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I was not - even the notion of could not seems to suggest a moment of recognition, but it was such a repressed dimension - I was not able to NOT wear a shirt like my brothers could. My brothers would, in the heat, run around shirtless, and I wouldn't do that, obviously.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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
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I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.
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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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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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Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim