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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: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Perhaps
Ironically
Written
Pacific
Looking
Memoir
Desire
Asia
Also
Ended
Back
California
Reach
Toward

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
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My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.
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The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
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Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.
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I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.
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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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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.
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I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
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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.
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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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I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.
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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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I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
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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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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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Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
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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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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.
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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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