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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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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Sabbatical
Occasion
Occasions
Suddenly
Comes
Doesn
Mean
Writing

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.
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I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
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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Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics.
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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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
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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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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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The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.
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Particularly in relationship to my father - there's something that daughters, girl children, do almost instinctually in their relationships with their father, so that physically, those boundaries must be respected and never crossed.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim