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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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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Heterosexuality
Whichever
Gender
Says
Important
More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem C. I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.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
I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
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
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
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or triflingly, God of War, but I did not have such a gendered muse in mind then.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
As a first-generation Asian American woman, for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an Asian American woman. Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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