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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: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Decisions
Track
Various
Traced
Ambition
Trajectory
Pieces
Memoir
Decision
Yearning
Made
Somehow
Good
Kept
More quotes by 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
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
I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
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
In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.
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
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
The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
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
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
