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In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Decision
Yearning
Made
Somehow
Good
Kept
Decisions
Track
Various
Traced
Ambition
Trajectory
Pieces
Memoir
More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
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
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
Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
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
Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
It is true that my characters have sex.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
