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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

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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Tree
Horizon
Courses
Motive
Course
Confused
Desire
Trees
Also
Toward
Spurred
Look
Among
Circumscribed
Looks
Beyond
Rooftops
Life
Writer
Motives

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
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If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.
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It is true that my characters have sex.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
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When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.
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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
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The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
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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
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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
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My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.
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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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