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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.

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
Written
Pacific
Looking
Memoir
Desire
Asia
Also
Ended
Back
California
Reach
Toward
Perhaps
Ironically

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.
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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.
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If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
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In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.
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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.
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I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.
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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.
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I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.
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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.
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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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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.
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I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
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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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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Rather, the collapsing between act and condition, I am with I do, feels like authenticity, an authenticity of being. The muse rewarded me for a few months, after April of 2012, by giving me poems, almost a poem each day, that I can claim as coming from my writer's status.
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I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim