Quote

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

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
Poetry
Written
Stills
Still
Sometimes
Roots
Cutting

More quotes by 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
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
Image
Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
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
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
Image
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.
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
People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even later when I grew up, I was constantly wearing dungarees, wearing guy shirts.
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
I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
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
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
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
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Image
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.
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