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: 80
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Mortality
Scare
Cancer
Aware
Makes

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Image
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
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
If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and the poet, my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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
Image
Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
John Milton famously claimed, Fame is the spur for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.
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
Image
If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.
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
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
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
It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
No one, evidently, except me has found No Alarms poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim