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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.

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
Also
Projection
Much
Weird
Something
Passionate
Outside
Realize
Realizing
Came
Hate
Hating

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
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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.
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It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.
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Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
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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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Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.
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That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.
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In the poem C, the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.
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One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
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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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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.
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Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
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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
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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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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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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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The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.
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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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.
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Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim