Home / Quotes / Quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“[Irony] has everything to do with what Tillie Olsen so powerfully imagined in her short story, "As I Stand Here Ironing" and elaborates on polemically in her 1978 book, Silences, in a chapter first delivered as a talk in 1967. As Olsen clearly saw it for women, my not being a writer was a material consequence of my being a woman - a wife, mother, housewife, and a certain kind of feminist teacher - attentive, one-on-one, face-to-face, nurturing, the kind who receives high ESCI evaluation scores from undergraduates and graduate students.”

Quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Author

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. more

You May Also Like

“These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that animate, absorb and saturate the subject, like indelible dyes spilled repeatedly over a plain fabric. No matter if the fabric is sturdy or delicate, translucent or opaque, those dyes will stain. They will color the days and years and life.”

Ifs Years Matter States Facts Mother Teacher Wife Subjects Color Profound Categories Delicate Gestures Fabric Commonplace Stains Housewife Sturdy Indelible Opaque Wife Mother

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.”

Firsts Sometimes Yearning Complaints

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Made Decision Pieces Ambition Track Various Memoir Yearning Good And Bad Trajectory Decisions Made

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

“I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman.”

Thinking Children Young Goal Fame Young Women

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.”

Faces Desire Reading Hours White Novel Moon Twenties Rooted Obsessive Spurs Love And Marriage

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Looks Desire Courses Tree Motive Confused Horizon Rooftops

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Has Beens Home Desire Written Childhood Driven Repulsion Childhood Home

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Desire Written Memoir California Asia Pacific

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