Quote

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Scare
Cancer
Aware
Makes
Mortality

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Image
You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem C. I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.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
Image
I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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
Image
Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or triflingly, God of War, but I did not have such a gendered muse in mind then.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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
Image
I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim