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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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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Except
Playing
Sure
Deliberately
Muse
Figure
Female
Figures

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet.
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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
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My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Stop Already is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
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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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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Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
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'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when you say, no or you have to say, no so often to the writing occasion, those occasions don't really come back.
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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Note, the reply will not be I write, an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.
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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Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim