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[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.
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
Write
Writing
Impatient
Muse
More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
It is true that my characters have sex.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems.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
In the poem C, the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.
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
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
I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
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
You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem C. I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.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
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 problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim