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Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes

Writer

Shirley Geok-lin Lim is a Singaporean-born writer known for her profound insights into multiculturalism and her rich literary works. Her writings often focus on themes of race, gender, and identity, which have resonated with readers worldwide.

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Famous Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes

“I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.”

Writing Body Social Numbers Female Focused Dimensions Rough Times Female Body

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home.”

Writing Kind Home Father Growing Up Growing Figures Brother Anxiety Males My Brother Insecurity Dominant

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Writing May Book Different Body Form Challenges Generations Creation Produce Males Defense Contribution Components Appropriation

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This is the world of writing.”

Ifs Knows World Writing Son Husband Setting Settings Muse

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant.”

World Writing Has Beens Book Female Males Gender Hopefully Dimensions Concrete Muse Infant

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Ifs Way Writing May Might Sound Crazy Homosexual Masculine

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.”

World Writing Female Muse

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.”

Should Writing Down And Muse Impatient

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Thinking Writing Silence Occasions

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.”

Writing Mean Occasions Sabbatical

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“I had to do the academic writing. At a top research university, publishing of a certain kind is very important. So your friend is right. You can't do three things well.”

Writing Wells Kind Important Certain Three Research University Academic Publishing Three Things Academic Writing

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.”

Writing Son Grew Grew Up Thirds Lists Priorities Wheels My Son Muse Lowest Mothering

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“This distraction is what one wants, which is very, very bad for the muse, because the muse hates not being in the line of sight. It's no longer an external conflict, like, oh, I have all these demands and I don't like them. The split is in the self. This may explain why, when I was in Santa Barbara before I went to Singapore and then now to Hong Kong, there was a writing moment when I was writing a poem a day. I had never done that before.”

Want Writing May Self Done Moments Hate Lines Demand Conflict Sight Distraction Splits Muse Santa Singapore Hong Kong Barbara Santa Barbara

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction in the world and turn that distraction into observations and then into poems.”

World Writing Use Able Turns Walking Observation Distraction Restlessness Nomadic Writing Poems

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.”

Ifs Writing Novel Walking If I Could

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Ifs Way Writing Walks Novel Wonderful If I Could Muse

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“I had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing."”

Writing Sex Reader Couple Folks Asian

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?”

Thinking Writing Fifty Shade Grey Fifty Shades Shades Of Grey

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Thinking Writing I Can Sex Novel Imagine Wonderful Happenings Plot Virginia Woolf

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“In publishing books and winning awards, it's like you've enjoyed this meal, you know, two months ago. How long can you be nourished by thinking about it? You've already ingested it, and you've excreted it, and that was two months ago. You had this fabulous meal. It's not going to keep you satiated today. You have to go out and get your next meal. For me, that's writing. I have to go out and hunt my next meal.”

Thinking Knows Writing Long Two Book Today Next Winning Like You Months Enjoyed Meals Awards Publishing Fabulous Hunts Two Months Publishing Books Winning Awards

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

People Writing Age Cities China Woods Witness Chinese Republic Communist Construction Academic Longevity Muse Emergence Hub

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.”

Ifs Want Writing Desire Successful Clear Decades Unhappy Interviews Productive Casual Always Happy Biographers

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.”

Writing Firsts Conditions Poet Judging Conscious Irony Collections Prize Approval Impossibility Alarms Crossings Commonwealth Writing Poetry Peninsulas

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“No one, evidently, except me has found "No Alarms" poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write.”

Writing Able Found Theme Alarms Obsessive

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.”

Writing Years May Lost Poet Fame Six Paradise Spurs Milton Revising

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.”

Way Writing Evidence Absurd

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.”

Writing Humans Character Stories Interest Community Company Novel Offers Paper Majors Gold Relation Locals Magazines Passages Swings Asian Edits Public Relations Local Community

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.”

Writing Notes Nine Performing

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Writing Able Language Imagination Subjects Theme Abandoned My Imagination Formation Obsessive

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“Emerging into writership, I have plans to discover my other themes, of nation and country, love and conflict, the body and transcendence, mutilation and wholeness, starvation and wicked plenty, and more. That is, I am already thinking ahead to more writing.”

Thinking Writing Country Body Nations Plans Conflict Plenty Theme Wicked Wholeness Transcendence Emerging Starvation Mutilation Country Love Thinking Ahead

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Knows Writing Doe Values Poet Counting Praxis

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Writing Running Language Rain Flow Decades Desert Dams

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.”

Writing Feet Knots Shoelaces

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

About the Author

Born: 1944
Known for: Writer
Quotes: 137

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