Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Rain
Flow
Language
Running
Writing
Formalism
Like
Dams
Desert
Decades

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Image
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
Image
Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
In the poem C, the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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
Image
Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
The Chinese traditionally have revered age and longevity - I have one and hope for the other! - so, in Taipei, a city-hub for global Chinese who dis-identify with the People's Republic of China's construction of a Communist nationalist Chineseness, I called on the Chinese muse of writing to witness my emergence out of the academic woods.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not diagnosed for myself!
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Note, the reply will not be I write, an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim