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Quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

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

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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

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“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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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.”

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Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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

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“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.”

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Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim