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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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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Notices
Restless
Everyone
Place
Body
More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.
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
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.
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
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
Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems.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
I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
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
Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
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
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.
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
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
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
It is true that my characters have sex.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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