Quote

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

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
Writers
Conferences
Writer
Spokes
Moment
Spoke
Moments
Site
Thought
Offered
Women
Appropriate
Manifesto
Contemporary
Announce
Profession
Conference

More quotes by 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
I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet.
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
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.
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
Stop Already is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.
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
I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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
Image
My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.
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
Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.
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
I was not - even the notion of could not seems to suggest a moment of recognition, but it was such a repressed dimension - I was not able to NOT wear a shirt like my brothers could. My brothers would, in the heat, run around shirtless, and I wouldn't do that, obviously.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim