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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
Courses
Motive
Course
Confused
Desire
Trees
Also
Toward
Spurred
Look
Among
Circumscribed
Looks
Beyond
Rooftops
Life
Writer
Motives
Tree
Horizon

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems.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.
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The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
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Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
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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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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
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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.
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Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
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I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
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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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Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
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Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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In the poem C, the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
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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.
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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