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I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

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
Grows
Maybe
Become
Never
Buddhists
Buddhist
Somehow
Unless
Grow

More quotes by 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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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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Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.
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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In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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
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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
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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.
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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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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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Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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
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Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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
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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