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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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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Crows
Crow
Associated
Suffered
Scare
Poem
Cancer

More quotes by 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.
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In a way, this kind of insight or recognition often permeates the way I think of character, how I plot action, and the way in which I use imagery, seeing binaries as false.
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If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act.
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[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.
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Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
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In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.
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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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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.
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One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
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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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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
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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.
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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I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
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.
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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'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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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
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Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim